Eric Muller has a long, thoughtful post about when and how to “report” academic plagiarism by faculty, prompted by Sally Greene’s contacting the Chronicle of Higher Ed to set in motion what has become L’Affaire LeBeau.

I agree that there are no “right” options in this scenario, and I tend to agree that contacting the Chronicle was the right thing to do. I do want to point out, however, that we should be careful not to draw a quick and hard distinction between Journalism-with-a-capital-J, on the one hand, and the blogosphere, on the other. Sally’s post rightly doesn’t do that, but I think that the success of working with the Chronicle was due in large measure to the facts (a) that the issue was professionally handled by a writer with both professional objectivity and some depth of knowledge, and (b) that the writer is employed by a publication that is respected, on the whole, for its impartiality and authority as a news resource. There are blogs that fit both (a) and (b), many of them written by college and university faculty.

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