Erin Siegal submitted the same work twice, to two different professors. But she insists she was above board about everything. Both her thesis adviser, Wayne Barrett, and her book seminar professor, Samuel Freedman, knew she would be sharing content between the two projects. The high-achieving scholarship student even made a PowerPoint presentation for Freedman explaining everything!

But now he's saying she took the three-way arrangement too far. Instead of giving him a big ole book and just excerpting 5,000 words for her thesis, she turned in the entire 16,000 words for her thesis at her adviser's urging. This apparently left no exclusive content for the book class, as Freedman had been expecting.

So, in new media terms: Siegal promised her magazine's print editor an exclusive tome teased online, but ended up giving the Web editor everything, at his request, to amplify the buzz (which worked, in academic terms; her thesis passed with honors). Now the print editor is totally pissed and is all, "you're fired," and she's like, "come ON!"

It's a bizarre spat from where we sit, given than Freedman knew there would be some content-sharing going on. Sure, he doesn't have the exclusive. But what he does have is a student who's poised to do quite well in a world where even the traditionalists at Time Inc. have come to believe in the idea of sharing across titles.

Siegal's email (sent to classmates in April — presumably she's "stop[ped] crying" since then):

(Top picture via ErinSiegal.com)

A letter handed out during the ceremonies is reproduced below. It sketches out the barest outlines of the problem (and you call yourselves journalists!), involving a high-performing student who was nevertheless blocked from graduating when a "misunderstanding" with a professor led her to earn an "Incomplete" grade.

The student, photojournalist Erin Siegal, is named in the letter. The professor isn't, but we're told it's former reporter Samuel Freedman (pictured).

We have no idea what went down, or what Siegal's peers mean when they refer to Freedman's "type of behavior", but we assume scholarship-student Siegal isn't about to start fishing in her pockets for the tens of thousands of dollars she would need to re-enroll on her own dime, if that's even possible. If it did come to that, the economics of the industry make it an unlikely bet for such an apparently bright journalist.