American Notes Hypocrisy

When Dean H. Joachim Maitre delivered his commencement speech at Boston University's College of Communication in May, he chose as his theme the decline of morality in American culture. He cited several sexually explicit and violent scenes in the movie The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover and said, "The politically correct, properly liberal notion is -- liberal in the sense of having no standards -- is that we should never dig deeper to consider whether a given work is true."

Or original, apparently. Last week the Boston Globe charged that 15 passages in Maitre's speech had been lifted almost word for word from an article by Michael Medved, a PBS film critic, published in a scholarly journal called Imprimis last February. But Medved said Maitre called to apologize. "He acknowledged that he had made a terrible mistake," said Medved. "He was full of chagrin and regret." Stay tuned for the sequel.