XPost: alt.politics.conservative, alt.politics.democrats, dc.politics   
   XPost: soc.culture.african.american   
   From: rkoch@banmlkday.com   
      
   We’re not much these days for icons. Washington owned slaves,   
   and Jefferson almost certainly slept with at least one of his   
   slaves, whom he never freed. JFK was a serial philanderer,   
   Tricky Dick actually was a crook, and MLK was an academic fraud   
   no more entitled to be called Doctor King than I am.   
      
   Oh, wait, I forgot: King is our one remaining icon.   
      
   So, like the naked emperor’s subjects, we just don’t talk about   
   the fact that, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica’s Executive   
   Director Theodore Pappas, King lifted a mind-boggling 60% of his   
   doctoral dissertation from other sources without crediting them.   
      
   While preparing his writings for publication in the late ’80s,   
   the editors of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and   
   Education Institute at Stanford noticed what they called   
   “extensive plagiaries” in all his academic papers, including his   
   dissertation. Stanford professor and Director of the King   
   Institute Clayborne Carson found that both King’s student papers   
   and his later essays and addresses all contained “numerous   
   instances of plagiarism and, more generally, textual   
   appropriation.”   
      
   In 1991, according to the New York Times, a panel of scholars at   
   Boston University, appointed by the provost to study the alleged   
   plagiarism in King’s dissertation, reported after a year’s study:   
      
   There is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the   
   dissertation 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.   
      
   Civil rights historian Ralph E. Luker has written of his and   
   Carson’s discovery of King’s horrendous plagiarism:   
      
   What became increasingly clear as we worked through the papers   
   from King’s early career is that there were serious problems of   
   plagiarism in his academic work. … [T]hey were a patchwork of   
   his own language and the language of scholars, often without   
   clear attribution. If anything, the pattern seemed to be that   
   the more familiar King was with a subject, the less likely he   
   was to plagiarize. On matters that were fairly alien to his   
   experience, he borrowed heavily from others and often with only   
   the slightest wink of attribution. To take two extreme examples,   
   an autobiographical paper,”Autobiography of Religious   
   Development” has no significant plagiarism in it; his paper on   
   “The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism,”   
   however, is composed almost exclusively of paragraphs lifted   
   from the best secondary sources available to him. Moreover, the   
   further King went in his academic career, the more deeply   
   ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear   
   attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation   
   seemed to be, by then, the product of his long established   
   practice. [Emphasis mine]   
      
   Incredibly, Boston University decided simply to put a note in   
   King’s dissertation, pointing out the pervasive plagiarism, but   
   found that revoking King’s doctorate would “serve no purpose.”   
      
   Say what?   
      
   We struggle with pandemic plagiarism in universities, but   
   revoking the doctorate of a famous guy who stole most of his   
   dissertation would serve no purpose? How about the purpose of   
   sending a warning to students and researchers that we take   
   cheating seriously? Or how about the simple purpose of   
   intellectual honesty and truth-telling?   
      
   The civil rights movement is clearly an important part of our   
   history. It’s probably important enough to deserve a day of   
   celebration. (I hesitate only because, if it is, it’s odd that   
   the enfranchisement of 51% of America, which didn’t occur until   
   1920, apparently isn’t important enough to merit its own day of   
   remembrance.) And MLK is certainly an appropriate symbol of the   
   civil rights movement.   
      
   Does that mean we need to talk only about his tremendous   
   accomplishments and hide his shocking lack of character?   
      
   No.   
      
   Let’s ditch the unfounded respect accorded to Rev. King by the   
   title “Doctor.” He was a liar and a cheat. He didn’t earn the   
   Ph.D. and he doesn’t deserve the title. He is as deeply flawed   
   as most of our other national leaders. Let’s quit pretending   
   otherwise.   
      
   http://crybelovedcountry.com/2012/01/the-problem-of-mlks-   
   plagiarism/   
                
      
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)