For a prestigious 2004 lecture at the Library of Congress, George P. Shultz, the former U.S. secretary of state, copied 22 sentences that had previously appeared in a Yale University journal. It seems like an obvious case of plagiarism.

But the author of those 22 sentences was Charles Hill, a Yale lecturer, former Foreign Service officer, and longtime collaborator with Mr. Shultz. In fact, Mr. Hill helped write the speech. Mr. Hill doesn’t have a problem with Mr. Shultz’s use of his words—including phrases like “The war in Iraq has eliminated a rogue state”—so why should anyone else?

The San Jose Mercury News reports that some students at Stanford University, where Mr. Shultz is now a professor emeritus of economics and a Hoover Institution fellow, do think the borrowing amounts to plagiarism and wonder whether a double standard applies to senior scholars like Mr. Shultz. The case, the newspaper points out, highlights the different standards between academe and politics.

Mr. Hill, though, said the copying was just part of the normal collaboration between speaker and speechwriter in politics. But then the Yale academic took a step further. “In every university in America, of every lecture that is heard,” he told the Mercury News, “80 percent is drawn from something else, without attribution.”

Do Chronicle readers agree that college professors plagiarize 80 percent of their classroom remarks?