Councilman Reeve Gone at Concordia

Amid plagiarism allegations and well into the fall semester, San Juan Capistrano City Councilman Derek Reeve is inexplicably no longer teaching at Concordia University.

"Derek Reeve is not currently employed by Concordia," a university spokeswoman said Friday, declining to provide an explanation.

The move comes two weeks after Patch reported that from copyrighted articles in blog essays he wrote for Patch, as well as in two of his City Council staff reports.

When the story broke, Reeve was employed part-time by Concordia, a private Christian university in Irvine. According to the school's fall schedule, Reeve was teaching two political science classes this semester: American Government and Comparative Political Systems.

Attempts to reach Reeve for comment were unsuccessful. But earlier this week, in a guest column published by the Orange County Register, he contended that blogs are informal literature in which attribution is not required.

"Most people recognize that blogging is an informal style of communication, like musings, in which the standards of communication are relaxed," he wrote. "Despite this, a false set of assumptions have been erroneously placed upon me in order to make pseudo-accusations of 'plagiarism.'"

Experts and authors disagreed, saying no matter what the format or venue is, the same rules apply: verbatim copying of another person's work needs to be in quotes, and attributed.

It isn't unheard of for colleges to punish professors who plagiarize. In 2004, for example, the University of New Hampshire penalized a professor for "scholarly misconduct" over a column published in Manchester's The Union Leader.

Reeve, an attorney, is also a part-time instructor at Saddleback Community College in Mission Viejo. A Saddleback spokeswoman declined to comment for this story.