XPost: alt.america, alt.journalism, alt.politics.obama   
   XPost: dc.politics   
   From: rkoch@banmlkday.com   
      
   Guest column by Gerry Harbison HARBISON is a professor of   
   chemistry.   
      
   "... plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - only be sure always to   
   call it please 'research.'" "Lobachevsky," by Tom Lehrer   
      
   In 1988, the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project made a   
   discovery that shocked it to its core.   
      
   The Project, a group of academics and students, had been   
   entrusted by Coretta Scott King with the task of editing King's   
   papers for publication. As they examined King's student essays   
   and his dissertation, they gradually became aware that King was   
   guilty of massive plagiarism - that is, he had copied the words   
   of other authors word-for-word, without making it clear that   
   what he was writing was not his own.   
      
   The Project spent years uncovering the full extent of King's   
   plagiarism. In November 1990, word leaked to the press, and they   
   had to go public. The revelations caused a minor scandal and   
   then were promptly forgotten.   
      
   Indeed, I had never heard of them until I read a student letter   
   to the Daily Nebraskan three weeks ago. That letter sent me in   
   search of the truth about Martin Luther King Jr.'s student   
   career.   
      
   Like most graduate students, King spent the first half of his   
   doctoral work taking courses in his degree area, theology. His   
   surviving papers from that period show that from the very   
   beginning he was transcribing articles by eminent theologians,   
   often word for word, and representing them as his own work.   
      
   After completing his course work, graduate students usually   
   write a dissertation or thesis, supposedly an independent and   
   original contribution to scholarship. King's thesis was anything   
   but original. In fact, the sheer extent of his plagiarism is   
   breathtaking.   
      
   Page after page contains nothing but direct, verbatim   
   transcriptions of the work of others. In 1990, the King Project   
   estimated that less than half of some chapters was actually   
   written by King himself. Since then, even more of his   
   "borrowings" have been traced.   
      
   Calculating the exact extent of his plagiarism will require a   
   computer analysis, but having looked over Chapter III in detail,   
   I estimate that at least three quarters of it was stolen from   
   other authors.   
      
   King stole from the subjects of his dissertation, the   
   theologians Tillich and Wieman. He copied the writings of other   
   theologians - passages from philosophy textbooks. But most   
   unforgivably of all, thousands of words in paragraph-sized   
   chunks, were taken from the thesis of a fellow student, Jack   
   Boozer, an ex-army chaplain who returned to Boston University   
   after the war to get his degree.   
      
   We even know how he did it, for King was systematic in his   
   plagiarism. He copied significant phrases, sentences or whole   
   paragraphs from the books he was consulting onto a set of index   
   cards. "Writing" a thesis was then a matter of arranging these   
   cards into a meaningful order.   
      
   Sometimes he linked the stolen parts together with an occasional   
   phrase of his own, but as often as not he left the words   
   completely unchanged. The index cards still survive, with their   
   damning evidence intact.   
      
   King fooled everybody: his adviser, his thesis reader and King   
   scholars for more than 30 years. Nor did he stop after   
   graduation; as early as the 1970s, King scholar Ira Zepp noticed   
   that sections of King's first published book Striding Towards   
   Freedom were taken verbatim from Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros   
   and Paul Ramsay's Basic Christian Ethics (sheesh!).   
      
   Zepp, as so many have done since then, remained silent.   
      
   Everything I've written above can easily be verified in a couple   
   of hours in Love Library. None of it comes from right-wing   
   scandalmongers who might have a vested interest in damaging   
   King's reputation.   
      
   But if King's plagiarism is so serious and so extensive, why do   
   we so rarely hear about it? Partly it is because the American   
   public thinks of plagiarism as an obscure issue that only an   
   egghead professor could get steamed up about.   
      
   And to some extent they're right. King's academic dishonesty is   
   after all mostly irrelevant to his life's work. The Civil Rights   
   movement of the 1950s and 1960s did us all a great good by   
   ending the greatest social evil of mid-20th century America -   
   legally sanctioned segregation and racial discrimination. That   
      
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