COLUMBIA Mo.
A distinguished University of Missouri-Columbia journalism professor will no longer write a weekly newspaper column after admitting he plagiarized material from a student reporter.
John Merrill, a professor emeritus at the university’s School of Journalism, wrote a Sunday column for the Columbia Missourian, a community newspaper affiliated with the school.
His Nov. 4 column about the university’s women’s and gender studies program used three quotes and other phrases taken directly from an Oct. 5 article in The Maneater, an independent student newspaper, according to the Missourian’s executive editor, Tom Warhover.
Warhover disclosed the plagiarism in his own column Sunday. A review of Merrill’s earlier work by Missourian editors found five more columns in which at least one quote had been taken from other publications without attribution, Warhover wrote.
“Missourian policy does not allow any writer to appropriate someone else’s words as his own, even when those words are within quotation marks,” he said.
While Warhover said several colleagues he consulted described Merrill’s transgression as “the ethical equivalent of a misdemeanor, not a felony,” he added that the newspaper “must hold itself to a higher standard.”
