Wuxtry. J-dean beats rap. He got the gist of it.

The Medill-Northwestern journalism dean is off the hook because he can’t be proven wrong.  He

did not violate any policies in using unattributed quotes in alumni magazine columns last year.

Provost Dan Linzer said that he concurred . . . that Dean John Lavine had accurately captured the essence of student sentiments about courses in his column, “Letter from the Dean.” [Italics added]

He used quotation marks, right?  To capture the essence?  Winking as he did so?  The quoted statements

cannot be [verified, but] sufficient material does exist . . . to demonstrate that sentiments similar to the quotes had been expressed by students,” . . . .  [Italics added again]

This was pretty truthy stuff?

“The author of a [column] like the “Letter from the Dean” could not reasonably be expected [to] have retained for a year the notes or e-mails documenting the sources of quotations used in the letter.”

But The Daily Northwestern asked every student, none of whom vouched for the blind-quote affirmations of the dean’s class:

[Columnist] Spett sought out the 29 students in the class Lavine had described and, he said, asked all of them if they had made the statements in Lavine’s story. All said no.

But the dean is not guilty, as it were of a criminal charge, when the matter was much more a civil complaint, of which he’s supposed to be innocent — a regular Caesar’s wife, being a teacher of mass communicators in a prestige-heavy institution.

Are we henceforward to look on Medill grads’ work as crafted so that we can’t pin a thing on the writer?  He’s in the clear, is he?  No matter the “caveat lector” that has to accompany his writing?