If one of my students had plagiarized the way Richard Muma did in his doctoral dissertation, I would have flunked them. Because words — and the ideas they convey — matter. As I used to explain to hundreds of students in my mass communication class — where a research paper of no less than 12

Human beings make mistakes. What Wichita State University president Richard Muma did doesn’t look like a mistake to me. Crafting the doctoral dissertation he submitted, for a degree he accepted, requires a string of deliberate choices.