Today was graduation at the Columbia Journalism School, and the ceremonies were tinged with regret. Not just because the news media is imploding, either: there's a mysterious flap involving a non-graduating student and a professor who supposedly breached "standards of communication."

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.