[continued from previous message]   
      
   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   
   would be hard pressed to find even a handful that address the   
   plagiarism question. With so much redundancy within this cottage   
   industry of publishing, one would think that authors would jump   
   at the chance to examine an unexplored facet of their subject’s   
   life – not so!   
      
   It would be wrong to think “plagiarist” every time one reflects   
   on the life of Martin Luther King. The Baptist minister led a   
   movement which secured voting rights for millions of Americans   
   deprived of suffrage and drastically reduced the amount of   
   racial discrimination present in the United States. Questions of   
   plagiary, adultery, and demagoguery (e.g., he labeled the   
   philosophy of Barry Goldwater, “Hitlerism”), are secondary.   
      
   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.   
      
   “Our immense debt to the man and our respect for his memory do   
   not,” Pappas writes, “provide the slightest excuse for a   
   political agenda that credits him with virtues that he did not   
   have and successes that he did not achieve.”   
      
   Plagiarism and the Culture War uncovers what rational observers   
   have known about Martin Luther King for decades: that the man   
   canonized by the academic left was, merely a man. What it tells   
   us about intellectuals more concerned with “diversity” than   
   truth is far more revealing.   
      
   http://westernrevival.org/?p=59   
                  
      
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)