But the editors soon found that they and the alleged plagiarist were pinned beneath the same wheels of justice.
Late Tuesday night, the month-long saga ended. The University Judiciary Committee — another student panel— cleared Jason Ally, editor in chief of the Cavalier Daily, of violating the university’s Standards of Conduct by publishing the Sept. 12 editorial that announced the journalistic sins.
Ally’s odyssey illustrates what can happen when the overheated rhetoric of student government yields real-life consequences. Self-governance is a cardinal rule for the students of U-Va., an institution founded by Thomas Jefferson and infused with his distinctive vision of democracy.
Both the university’s Honor Committee and Judiciary Committee wield adult-size powers. At various times in recent weeks, Ally, four other Cavalier Daily editors and the alleged plagiarist all faced potential expulsion. The student accused of plagiarism has not been identified by the paper or the Honor Committee.
“I would like to think that the students of the University of Virginia are capable of governing themselves,” said Ally, a 21-year-old senior from Burke. “But the way this one situation played out does leave me puzzled.”
A copy editor at the Cavalier Daily discovered the alleged plagiarism in early September while fact-checking an article not yet published. The fact-checker searched for a passage on Google, and among the results was an article from a professional media outlet that included an identical passage. That triggered a broader review of the author’s work.
“It turned out that pretty much every single piece had been plagiarized,” said Andrew Seidman, a 21-year-old senior from Arlington County who is managing editor of the Cavalier Daily.
Passages had been copied verbatim from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Wikipedia, among other sources, without attribution, the review found. The Cavalier Daily reported its findings in an article titled “Taking action” and credited to the publication’s five-person managing board.
Commercial newspapers are expected to identify plagiarists and even preserve their published articles, allowing the public to judge the situation.
The Cavalier Daily editors chose to conceal both the author and his work. The reason: They had reported him to the Honor Committee, a panel that goes to great lengths to protect the identities of alleged offenders. “We took every possible step to conceal the identity of the author,” Ally said.
The Honor Committee did not agree. A few days after the Cavalier Daily published its findings, the student chairman of the Honor Committee filed charges against all five members of the newspaper’s managing board with the Judiciary Committee.
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