XPost: mn.politics, alt.los-angeles, alt.politics.democrats.d   
   XPost: alt.disney   
   From: rkoch@banmlkday.com   
      
   by Daniel J. Flynn of Academia.org   
      
   “Three death threats, one left hook to the jaw, 40 rejections   
   from 40 publishers in 40 months, and a sold-out first edition.”   
      
   – Theodore Pappas   
      
   “Plagiarism and the Culture War is written with a sobriety that   
   is essential to effectively discussing such sensitive topics as   
   race and the shortcomings of a martyred hero. While   
   hagiographers may shout ‘racism’ at any hint of imperfection   
   attributed to the slain civil rights leader, Pappas’ courageous   
   work assures that they can no longer continue this smokescreen   
   with any legitimacy.”   
      
   – Campus Report   
      
      
      
   The Academic Cover-up of the King Plagiarism Story   
      
   Denizens of the campuses are fond of invoking the buzzword,   
   “diversity.” The frequency and carelessness with which the term   
   is used has obliterated any stable definition of this once   
   seemingly benign word. For those unfamiliar with campus   
   newspeak, the word “diversity” conjured up thoughts of variety   
   and difference. When academics talk about diversity, however,   
   the term is most often used as a euphemism for conformity.   
      
   At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, an appreciation   
   of diversity (o the academic variety) translates into a history   
   department that houses 49 registered Democrats and one   
   Republican. A fairly recent study gave Democrats a 22 to 2 among   
   Stanford’s historians. The University of Colorado-Boulder is   
   similarly inclined toward diversity, putting forth 27 history   
   professors enrolled in the Democratic Party and zero in the GOP.   
   Cornell and Dartmouth shout Republican history faculty members   
   as well, with 29 and 10 Democrats, respectively.   
      
   This Alice-in-Wonderland concept of diversity often leads to the   
   promotion of ideas of dubious scholarship. A “gay” Lincoln,   
   Africans discovering the Americas, and special “women’s ways of   
   knowing” are just a few ideas that are given much credence in   
   higher education. While much of what is taught in America’s   
   lecture halls is certainly disturbing, a more serious affront to   
   legitimate scholarship is academia’s sins of omission. The level-   
   headed will always dismiss what is frivolous and included in the   
   curriculum. What is sound and excluded will never even make it   
   to the realm of debate.   
      
   One such omission is the painful work of Theodore Pappas   
   unveiling Martin Luther King as an habitual plagiarist. As   
   Pappas notes in Plagiarism and the Culture War, “No one suffers   
   the pangs and arrows of outrageous fortune like the exposer of a   
   famous plagiarist, for it is he, not the sinner and certainly   
   not the sin, who becomes the center of debate, the target of   
   abuse, and the victim of the hot and harsh lights of public   
   scrutiny.”   
      
   And suffer Pappas has. Since exposing King as a plagiarist in   
   1990, Pappas notes that he has received numerous threatening   
   letters, “most of them postmarked from university towns.” He’s   
   been the object of insult amongst King partisans (even to the   
   point of being assaulted.) And Plagiarism and the Culture War   
   was rejected by 40 publishing houses before being releases in   
   July. As one publisher, explained, “I recommend against   
   publishing this book, because such honesty and truth-telling   
   could only be destructive.”   
      
   The evidence laid out by Pappas of King’s plagiarism is   
   irrefutable. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Nobel Prize   
   Lecture, and “I have a Dream” address before a crowd of 250,000   
   in 1963 all contained significant portions taken from other   
   sources. Pappas’ analyses of King’s Boston University theology   
   dissertation, which takes up the bulk of the book, reveals   
   dozens of passages stolen from the dissertation of Jack Boozer,   
   and BU doctoral candidate who was awarded his Ph.D. in theology   
   just a few years before king. One such passage reads,   
      
   “Correlation means the correspondence of data in the sense of a   
   correspondence between religious symbols and that which is   
   symbolized by them. It is upon the assumption of this   
   correspondence that all utterances about God’s nature are made.   
   This correspondence is actual in the logos nature of God and the   
   logos nature of man.   
      
   A reading of Boozer’s original paragraph shows a difference only   
   of an insertion of hyphens between the words “logos” and   
   “nature,” making any side-by-side comparison of the two passages   
   a waste of space. More than half of King’s dissertation – like   
   the aforementioned example – reads like a near copy of Boozer’s   
   work.   
      
   The “conjoining of different sections of Boozer’s dissertation   
   could not have been done without great circumspection and   
   forethought,” notes Pappas, so “it gives lie to the notion that   
   King somehow plagiarized unintentionally.” Pappas further   
   discounts claims that King was unaware he had engaged in any   
   wrongdoing by observing that he had spent seven years in post-   
   secondary education,  had taken a thesis-writing course, and had   
   been warned by an advisor that his paper nearly quoted another   
   work without attribution.   
      
   Many readers might wonder why King, an intelligent and capable   
   man, would cheat his way to a Ph.D. Of more relevance is the   
   question of why faculty let him do it. King’s doctoral advisor   
   also played the same role with Jack Boozer. He approved Boozer’s   
   paper in 1952 and just three years later stamped his imprimatur   
   on King’s purloined dissertation.   
      
   Nearly four decades later, when confronted with the same chance   
   to redeem itself in the wake of the plagiarism charges, BU chose   
   to cover-up once again. Then acting BU President John Westling   
   labeled the story “false,” claiming that the paper had “been   
   scrupulously examined and reexamined by scholars,” resulting in   
   the discovery of “Not a single instance of plagiarism.”   
      
   Clayborne Carson, editor of the federally-funded King Papers   
   Project at Stanford University, chose obfuscation over truth as   
   well. Carson sat on the information and denied early reports of   
   the preacher’s intellectual theft despite knowing about it three   
   years before the story broke. In early 1990, Carson told his   
   underwriter, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Like   
   him, the NEH didn’t think it necessary to disclose this   
   inconvenient information to the American public.   
      
   When it became obvious that King did, in fact, regularly   
   plagiarize, his academic cheerleaders chose to redefine   
   plagiarism rather then reassess the Baptist preacher. For   
   Arizona State University Professor Keith Miller, King’s   
   unattributed use of other scholars’ work is “synthesizing,”   
   “alchemizing,” “incorporations, “intertexulaizations,”   
   everything but the “p” word. “How could such a compelling leader   
   commit what most people define as a writer’s worst sin”? asked   
   Miller. “The contradiction should prompt us to rethink our   
   definition of plagiarism.”   
      
   While shameless intellectuals peddle baseless allegations about   
   the marital fidelity of Dwight Eisenhower or spin tales of   
   Thomas Jefferson begetting slave offspring, they consider it   
   blasphemy to honestly assess the plagiarism of Martin Luther   
   King. There are literally hundreds of books about King, yet one   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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