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Indeed, six years after a series of "exposé" articles were first published in the San Jose Mercury News, it's still not clear what the phrase is supposed to describe. In terms of the size of its database and lasting influence on the field, Tudor's master's research project was hardly a "monster study" -- a large study with far reaching conclusions. Her project was a four-month, localized study that involved 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport. After the study was bound as a master's thesis and placed on the shelves of UI Libraries, it was never published independently and was hardly cited in audiology articles until after the newspaper series brought it to national attention.

If "monster" is supposed to apply to Johnson and Tudor, the term fails to fit either researcher very well. Some of the strongest critics of the Tudor study -- from UI officials who have denounced the study without denouncing Johnson to expert audiologists who challenge Tudor's conclusions -- agree that neither Johnson nor Tudor sought to cause stuttering in the children they were working with. The hypothesis that Tudor was testing was whether attempts to counteract stuttering by drawing attention to it actually reinforced episodes of "disfluency." The researchers gained permission to use children at the orphans' home because of a long relationship between the facility and UI researchers.

Yes, for the 21-century general reader, Mary Tudor's thesis, "An Experimental Study of the Effect of Evaluative Labeling on Speech Fluency" (1939), does seem disturbing. The study involves some deceptive practices and later developments in the ethics of human subject research have challenged whether children in such an institutional situation should be considered research candidates. If nothing else, the study hardly seems like a research project any parent would want performed on his or her child.

But the rhetoric around this study -- from the headlines on the 2001 stories to later coverage of the lawsuits and university apologies -- sometimes bombastically compares Tudor's research to the atrocities performed by Nazi doctors or, more domestically, to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which more than 400 men were misinformed about the nature of their condition and never told that the research would offer them no therapeutic benefit. The Tudor study was a four-month study that started and ended long before the establishment of ethical standards like the Nuremberg Code and the Helsinki Declaration. The Tuskegee study proved so horrendous in part because it continued from 1932 until 1973 -- long after such standards were supposed to be in place.

There is no evidence that Tudor and Johnson intended to harm the children used in their research. The actions of these researchers shouldn't be compared to the actions of Nazi doctors, of Tuskegee researchers or even of the more recent examples of U.S. researchers using human subjects in developing countries for research methods deemed unethical in the U.S. Plus -- as pointed out by Stuttering Foundation of America President Jane Fraser on today's Opinion page -- no other researcher in the last seven decades has demonstrated that labeling someone a stutterer or criticizing speech alone leads to the development of stuttering.

So let's put this all in perspective: It was a short-lived study focused on discovering whether the words parents used to correct a child's disfluency actually contributed to the disfluency. It was overseen by a man who had such a severe stutter as a child and was himself put through such a variety of testing that he called himself a professional lab rat. Its conclusions have been discounted, and audiology studies have moved far away from its original hypothesis.

Although disturbing, the study fails to fit the definition of "monstrous."

Of course, there may have been unintended consequences to this research. If so, the effects should be documented and the victims reimbursed. University officials say that's what the recent $925,000 settlement is supposed to do. But in today's litigation-mad society -- especially one in which even this study gets described in the language Nazism or mad-scientism -- it's hard to see the state's recent out-of-court settlement as anything but the chance to make the suit just go away.