XPost: alt.politics.conservative, alt.politics.democrats, dc.politics   
   XPost: soc.culture.african.american   
   From: rkoch@banmlkday.com   
      
   The Academic Creed   
   in Theory and Practice   
      
   Dr. Paul Trout, Professor Emeritus Department of English   
      
   Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana   
      
   Ed. Note: The Foundation is very disturbed about why a man with   
   apparently very little integrity, is considered a national icon,   
   and has a holiday named for him. There are a large number of   
   black men who deserve greater recognition than this man.   
      
   The Plagiarism of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   
      
   One notorious plagiarism case--involving, sadly, Martin Luther   
   King, Jr.--illustrates that some professors not only ignore   
   plagiarism but excuse it.   
      
   In 1991 a panel of scholars at Boston University (BU) ruled that   
   Dr. King plagiarized parts of his 1952 doctoral dissertation at   
   BU by "appropriating material from sources not explicitly   
   credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally   
   and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or   
   verbatim quotation." A careful analysis of King's dissertation   
   by Theodore Pappas revealed that over sixty percent was copied   
   from an earlier dissertation. Clayborne Carson, director of the   
   Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, and professor of history   
   at Stanford University, found additionally that King's student   
   essays and published and unpublished addresses and essays all   
   contain "numerous instances of plagiarism and, more generally,   
   textual appropriation."   
      
   When the charges became public, some professors--both black and   
   white--rushed to palliate or deny King's wrongdoing. The most   
   bald-faced effort came from the Acting President of Boston   
   University (October 1990): "Dr. King's dissertation has, in   
   fact, been scrupulously examined and reexamined by   
   scholars...Not a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has   
   been identified" (in Pappas Plagiarism 68). Taking a similar   
   tack, the committee of BU academics found "no blatancy" in the   
   plagiarism despite the fact that King appropriated page after   
   page from other works.   
      
   Others tried to palliate the offense by saying it was the result   
   of "carelessness" (despite the fact that King had taken a   
   graduate course in thesis writing). A few, like Keith D. Miller,   
   an English professor at Arizona State University, notoriously   
   argued that King merely had drawn on the oral traditions of the   
   black church in which "voice merging"--the blending of the words   
   and ideas of those who spoke before--is commonplace.   
      
   A somewhat conflicted Professor Carson went further, describing   
   King's "pattern of unacknowledged appropriation of words and   
   ideas," which he does label "plagiarism," as a "legitimate   
   utilization of political, philosophical, and literary texts"   
   that allowed King "to express his ideas effectively using the   
   words of others" via a "successful composition method." And   
   Professor George McLean praised King's plagiarized dissertation   
   as "a contribution in scholarship for which his doctorate was   
   richly deserved" (in Pappas "Life and Times" 43). As Theodore   
   Pappas points out, to say that [King's] doctorate was "richly   
   deserved" when 66 percent of his dissertation was plagiarized is   
   "absurd and dishonest" (Ibid.).   
      
   But "absurdity" and "dishonesty" now often trump adherence to   
   the academic creed. When confronted with irrefutable proof of   
   plagiarism, what did many notable scholars do? In the words of   
   Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Research Professor of Religious   
   Studies at the University of South Florida:   
      
   They lied, they told half-truths, they made up fables, they did   
   everything they could but address facts; three enlightened   
   individuals even threatened [Pappas's] life. In the face of   
   their own university's rules against plagiarism, Boston   
   University's academic authorities and professors somehow found   
   excuses for King's plagiarism.   
      
   They found extenuating circumstances, they reworded matters to   
   make them sound less dreadful, they compromised their own   
   university's integrity and the rules supposedly enforced to   
   defend and protect the process of learning and the consequent   
   degrees. They called into question the very standing of the   
   university as a place where cheating is penalized and   
   misrepresentation condemned (in Pappas, I 1).   
      
   http://whitestonefoundation.org/BibleResearch/Academic%20Crisis/   
      
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