COMM 317: Ethics 'lab' at Northwestern

An ethics controversy has been simmering along at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and it doesn't look like it's going away. It arose when John Lavine, dean of the school, was accused of fabricating quotes in an alumni magazine. You don't make up quotes. Period. That's a basic law of journalistic ethics.

If you get caught, you get fired. Period. Paragraph. End of story.

Well, that's the way it ought to be.

At Northwestern, the story has taken a different bounce. Lavine denies wrong-doing, but he acknowledges he can't document the quotes. The student paper, The Daily Northwestern, has interviewed students in the class where Lavine says he got the quotes, and they all deny giving him the quotes. Faculty and students are divided on the issue, and it has turned into one of those "he-said, she-said" stories where one side charges the other with something and the other side denies the charges.

In today's Chicago Tribune, columnist and blogger Eric Zorn reports he has evidence at least one quote was fabricated. Says Zorn:

That quote is a 63-word discursion Lavine attributed to “a Medill junior” who took a particular course in the winter quarter of 2007.

Daily Northwestern columnist David Spett said he interviewed all 29 students in the class, and all 29 denied ever speaking or writing the words in quotes.

Northwestern journalism professor David Protess conducted interviews with all five Medill juniors from that class and found what I found when I re-interviewed them: They denied being the source of the 63 words.

I contacted each of them again Monday to ask if anyone from the provost’s office or the committee investigating the issue had interviewed them: Each said no.

This is odd.

Or maybe, adds Zorn, it's not so odd at all. Maybe, he says, somebody is covering up. Or maybe the dean and the professors are right. Maybe it will turn out Lavine's reporting was ethical. So far, one thing appears certain: The controversy isn't going away.

Medill is one of the top journalism schools in the Midwest, in the entire country. It has a model student ethics policy on plagiarism, fabrication and other issues. Now it looks like students there are getting a lab course in the ins and outs of academic integrity.