I’m happy to see four well-respected Missouri colleagues weigh in on the plagiarism issue. I’m gratified on two accounts: 1) that they think an essay I wrote on plagiarism in 1983 is still worthy of consideration; and 2) that they seem to agree with me that in the John Merrill case the consequences did not fit the transgression. I agree with them that Professor Merrill acted in violation of Missouri’s standards and practices. What I can’t abide is calling that action “plagiarism.”

The Missouri team seems to think this opinion strays from the ones I held when I wrote “The Unoriginal Sin,” for what was then the Washington Journalism Review (now the American Journalism Review). Perhaps it does, but with this historical context: After a winner of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Distinguished Writing Awards was accused of plagiarism, I was commissioned to study the case and offer a report. That research formed the basis of my 1983 essay.

What I found in my research was almost useless. There were cases aplenty, of course, some notorious. But news media ethics -- just a couple of years out from the “Jimmy’s World” scandal -- was in its infancy, and I found few guidelines or protocols to help me beyond the journalistic equivalent of “Just say no.”

So I thought what was needed at the time were some basic definitions, and a taxonomy of those occasions where borrowing and attribution were problematic: such as borrowing from the “morgue,” from press releases, from wire services, from published research, even, on occasion, from your own previously published work. At that time, when standards were loose or invisible, I felt the need to build the foundation that the Missouri group built upon for its textbook.

An essay that has influenced my current thinking is “Defining Deviancy Down,” written in 1993 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for American Scholar magazine. In this essay, Moynihan, senator and scholar, looks at American culture and makes a distinction between societies in which the standards are too high and one in which they are too low. If it is too easy to deviate from the norm, he argues, your society is oppressive.

For example, if you are a woman living in a fundamentalist Islamic society, even showing your hair in public may be considered deviant and punishable. (An excellent example of this comes from the British teacher in Sudan whose life was threatened when she committed the “blasphemy” of letting school children name a stuffed bear Mohammad.) In such a society, few distinctions are permissible, as we see in America where some “zero tolerance” programs are put in place to suppress behaviors such as drug abuse by high school teens. (I know a girl who was suspended for giving Midol to a friend.)

So if the standards are too high, freedom and creativity are oppressed. But what happens when the standards become too loose? What happens during a century when the Victorian equivalent of the burka is replaced by the bikini, which becomes the thong, which devolves into flashing college girls in those “Girls Gone Wild” videos?

To change the analogy, I remember a time when divorces or births out of wedlock were considered deviations from the social norm. Moynihan would not have embraced the ostracism of unwed single mothers in the 1950s and '60s, but he became concerned in later decades that the legitimizing of illegitimacy would have devastating social consequence.

Put in simple terms, trouble occurs when standards are either too tight or too lax.

To translate these theories to our current case, I would argue that the Missouri team has imposed upon its students and colleagues too stringent a definition of what constitutes plagiarism. By calling the lifting of quotes for an opinion column plagiarism -- rather than a simple violation of standards and practices -- the team inadvertently equates a blasphemous joke with burning down a church. The collateral damage from imposing upon students such a scrupulous conscience includes -- I say this with respect for scholars I admire -- its own kind of loss of credibility.