• How Martin Luther King, Jr. Got Away With Plagiarism: Different Strokes

    From Ronny Koch@21:1/5 to All on Tue Jan 16 10:32:42 2024
    XPost: alt.politics.conservative, alt.politics.democrats, alt.business
    XPost: dc.politics

    This is perhaps the most outrageously hypocritical incident in
    the history of American higher education: how Boston University
    allowed Martin Luther King, Jr., to retain his doctorate
    posthumously. This was reverse racism: "We white folks know that
    Darkies have different standards."

    (As a Christian Reconstructionist, I believe that God's law and
    moral standards aplly to everyone, across the board. As the son
    of one of the four Los Angeles-based FBI agents -- Ahern,
    Benjamin, Moorehead, and North -- who identified James Earl Ray
    as King's assassin, I was taught that everyone deserves the
    protection of the law. My father had no use for King's politics,
    but he was proud of his work on that world-famous case.)

    Martin Luther King was born Michael King.

    http://www.dclibrary.org/mlk/mlk-about.html
    He never did have his name legally changed. He took his father's
    name.

    He received his Ph.D. from Boston University, where he
    plagiarized his doctoral dissertation. He also plagiarized
    sections of Stride Toward Freedom. This was his practice
    throughout his academic career. He regarded other men's words
    just as he regarded other men's wives: as ripe for the taking.

    His plagiarism has been known for a decade. It is discussed in
    detail by Theodore Pappas, who wrote a book about it: The Martin
    Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story (Rockford, Illinois: Rockford
    Institute, 1994).

    http://contra-mundum.org/cm/reviews/tw_plagiarism.pdf
    Pappas has published examples of this in the book he edited,
    Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther
    King and Other Prominent Americans. (Halberg, 1998).

    http://www.cycad.com/cgi-
    bin/pinc/apr2000/books/gt_plagiarism.html http://www.academia.org/store/plagiarism_culture_war.html
    The earliest warning that King was a plagiarist came from Ira
    Zepp, in an unpublished story, which revealed that sections of
    King's book, Stride Towqard Freedom, had been lifted from books
    written by two theologians.

    His plagiarism includes his Nobel Prize lecture, his "I have a
    Dream" speech, and his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." One
    biographer called this activity "ghostwriting." (Note: authors
    pay ghostwriters for their work. King did not pay anyone for the
    purloined sections.) A chronology of the story of his plagiarism
    appears here:

    http://chem-gharbison.unl.edu/mlk/chronology.html
    [2005 Note: This document is no longer on-line. Substitiute this
    one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King%2C_Jr._- _authorship_issues]
    The first public revelation of King's plagiarized Ph.D.
    dissertation came in the London Telegraph (Dec. 3, 1989). The
    story was suppressed in the U.S. until January, 1991, when
    Pappas blew the lid off. (Theodore Pappas, "A Doctor in Spite of
    Himself: The Strange Career of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s
    Dissertation," Chronicles [Jan. 1991].) The appearance of this
    article forced the American press to admit what King had done,
    how the editor of King's papers had suppressed the fact for
    years, lying to those who inquired about this.

    The large number of plagiarized sources in everything King wrote
    and preached, from the beginning of his career, is visible in
    volume 1 of his Papers (Berkeley: University of California
    Press, 1992); the plagiarized originals appear in the footnotes.
    The publication of this volume was delayed for many years
    because of this public relations problem.

    The response of the academic community and the media indicates
    that liberals' icons are not allowed to be publicly embarrassed,
    in life or posthumously. The CHRONICLES article led to a series
    of defenses of King's plagiarism, including an immediate one
    written by a Roman Catholic professor of metaphysics: George F.
    McLean, "King's Scholarship Was Central to His Vision," Wall
    Street Journal (Jan. 21, 1991).

    In 1992, an untenured English professor at Arizona State
    University, Keith Miller, had his book published: a defense of
    King's plagiarism, which he calls "intertextualizations,"
    "incorporations," "borrowings," "echoing," "resonances," and
    "voice merging." On the defense, see Keith Miller, Voice of
    Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King Jr., and Its
    Sources (New York: Free Press, 1992). This book was reviewed by
    Pappas, "A Houdini of Time," Chronicle (Nov. 1992).

    A faculty committee at Boston University, which awarded King the
    Ph.D., concluded in 1991 that the first half of his dissertation
    was 45 percent stolen, the second half was 21 percent stolen,
    but the thesis nonetheless remains legitimate and "an
    intelligent contribution to scholarship." The school did not
    revoke his degree. (Pappas, Martin Luther King, p. 103.)

    Reed Irvine, who runs Accuracy in Media, a conservative media-
    monitoring organization, has summarized the scandal.

    Theodore Pappas has written a piece for Chronicles magazine that
    should be required reading for every journalism student and
    journalist. It tells the story of how the media, including book
    publishers, tried to suppress the story of how famed civil
    rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King committed plagiarism --
    stealing material from other people and claiming it as his own.
    For his role in bringing this to the public's attention, Pappas
    says he received three death threats, one left hook to the jaw
    and 40 rejections from 40 publishers in 40 months. This is quite
    a record. When he finally found a publisher, the book's first
    edition was sold out. It carried the title, The Martin Luther
    King, Jr. Plagiarism Story.
    Pappas recounts his effort in publicizing the story in the May
    issue of Chronicles magazine, where he serves as managing
    editor. Pappas was the first journalist who exposed, with
    parallel quotations, how segments of King's Ph.D dissertation
    had been copied from a previous work. He estimates that 66
    percent of King's dissertation was plagiarized. On top of
    revelations about King's womanizing, the plagiarism allegations
    served to demonstrate that while King postured as a paragon of
    moral virtue, he was in reality a scoundrel. This is not
    something that a lot of people wanted to hear.

    The Wall Street Journal, considered by some a conservative
    newspaper, heard the story was breaking and ran its own piece --
    a whitewash of the charges against King. Even the Journal's
    editorial page tried to suppress the significance of the story
    by insisting that it had to be covered in a "carefully
    modulated" manner.

    Writing in the New Republic magazine, Charles Babington would
    later reveal that the Washington Post, the New York Times and
    the New Republic itself all had known the facts about King's
    plagiarism but refused to publish them. The Times eventually did
    cover the issue but in a subsequent editorial suggested that the
    plagiarism was somehow comparable to a politician using a ghost
    writer for speeches.

    Pappas's expanded version of the King Plagiarism Story has now
    been published by Hallberg Publishing Corporation under the
    title "Plagiarism and the Culture War." Regarding the publishers
    who rejected his original book and the new edition, Pappas says
    three of them said any criticism of King would be in "bad taste"
    because "King isn't around to defend himself." Pappas notes that
    such an approach would mean the end of historical studies and
    scholarship in general. He points out that such an attitude
    hasn't stopped various so-called "scholars" and academics from
    defaming one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson.
    Apparently it's all right to bad-mouth Jefferson; after all, he
    was a white European male. But King, a black civil rights
    leader, has to be spared any criticism. This is the double-
    standard that infects the media today. . . .

    http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/1998/05/11.htm
    Prof. Trout of the University of Montana -- a fitting name for
    anyone who lives in Montana -- has written an excellent piece on
    how a rising tide of plagiarism is now undermining higher
    education. (Stealing from the Web is easy, but students can also
    buy essays on-line.) He writes:

    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 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://mtprof.msun.edu/Fall1999/creed.html
    Jacob Neusner is probably the most prolific scholar in American
    history. Five or six years ago, I asked him to send me a copy of
    his published works. He did. The list was then over 30 single-
    spaced pages long. He is a publishing phenomenon like no other I
    am aware of. He has every right to complain about what King did.

    CONCLUSION

    There is a common belief today that men's private sins should
    not be considered in our assessment of their public lives. This
    public philosophy can be summarized as follows: "Cigars shared
    between consenting adults don't count." It is always applied by
    liberals to liberals. Sometimes it applies to conservatives,
    unless the sins involve money, especially Political Action
    Committee money taken from business. But money taken by the
    Democratic National Committee from agents of Communist China is
    like Martin Luther King, Jr.'s plagiarism: irrelevant.

    There is a now-discarded phrase: "If a man will cheat on his
    wife, he will cheat on anyone." That is my view. That is the way
    I vote, when I vote.

    King was right about Rosa Parks. He was right about non-
    violence. But what he did to other men's wives, and to his own
    wife, was unconscionable. Also unconscionable was his career-
    long theft of the words that he stole for public use. But the
    liberals who dismiss all of this are worse, for they seek to
    make intellectual theft and adultery seem irrelevant. They
    prefer to undermine the ethics of civilization for the sake of
    politics and race.

    http://www.garynorth.com/public/335.cfm


    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)