The Martin Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story, by Pappas.
Reviewed by Barry R. Gross
Society, Jan-Feb 1996 v33 n2 p85(2)
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/race/mlk.html (this link is not active now. C.Z)It is rarely pleasant to look at the feet of the great, for they are too often made of clay. And so it is with Martin Luther King, Jr. On the evidence, there can be little doubt that he plagiarized his Ph.D. dissertation at Boston University from an earlier one by a man, now deceased, named Jack Boozer. Pappas compares eight or more passages from Boozer's thesis with passages from King's in which the ideas and phrasing are virtually identical. He also cites several passages in which King and Boozer make almost identical mistakes in citation or punctuation. King plagiarized much else as well: Pappas identifies five plagiarized passages from King's pre-dissertation period, as well as from the final section of his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, whose passage "From every mountain let freedom ring . . ." was first spoken by another black preacher, Archibald Carey, at the 1956 Republican National Convention.
Does it really matter? After all, it might be said that King was a great leader whose political accomplishments in civil rights far outweigh any wrongs committed in another field. King's reputation does not rest upon scholarship or a contribution to systematic theology. If it did, certainly his appropriation of the work of others would raise very serious questions. King's reputation, however, is not scholarly but political. Why dredge up all this past history?
But it does matter; it matters very much. Plagiarism is intellectual fraud. A plagiarist is, as Lord Chesterfield said, a "man that steals other people's thoughts and puts ‘em off for his own. " The academy is supposed to stand for intellectual integrity. If the academy does not take plagiarism seriously, if it does not publicize and punish every act of plagiarism it discovers, if it does not take pains to discover them, then what has the academy got left? For what can the academy stand except its own intellectual integrity? The academy is not a business; it cannot point to a bottom line of profit to justify its existence. Nor is the academy a political entity; it cannot point to accomplishment in statecraft or public welfare to justify its existence. All it can point to is its guarantee that, insofar as humanly possible, the intellectual efforts produced under its aegis are genuine, that its assertions are believed to be correct, are believed to be made without knowing bias, and are made originally by the authors who claim them. And if the academy cannot say that, it can say nothing at all.
Perhaps, then, the real story concerns not so much Martin Luther King, Jr., as it does the academy. How did the academy react when it became known among a few that King was a plagiarist? How could the plagiarism have been passed off in the first place? Here the story is truly appalling.
As Pappas outlines the history, King received a Ph.D. in theology at Boston University in 1955 for a dissertation entitled "A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman." Professor L. Harald De Wolff was the first reader and, therefore, King's advisor. Three years earlier, Jack Stewart Boozer had written a dissertation, also at Boston University. Its subject was also Paul Tillich, and the very same L. Harald De Wolff was the first reader. So how did King's plagiarism get by? Well, there are three possibilities: Professor De Wolff neglected to read either or both theses, in which case he was incompetent, or Professor De Wolff read them both and failed to notice the plagiarism, in which case, also, he was incompetent, or Professor De Wolff noticed the plagiarism but did not think it serious enough to mention, in which case, too, he was incompetent. There is a fourth hypothesis that is possibly even more damning: that Professor De Wolff noticed the plagiarism but did not think it mattered for a black man destined to be a preacher to be held to a rigorous scholarly standard.
Pappas points out that once the plagiarism was exposed, new apologists-Professor Keith Miller, for one--took the last path. In a book and in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Miller takes the position that black preachers have traditionally "borrowed" from each other and, coming from an oral tradition, are not acclimatized to alien white scholarly norms. He asks us to rethink our definition of plagiarism. Pappas quotes Miller: "The process of securing fundamental human rights such as those King championed -- outweighs the right to the exclusive use of intellectual and literary property." Really? Nor did King see things that way, for, ironically, he himself sought copyright for his "I Have a Dream" speech.
The plagiarism was uncovered by academics in charge of editing King's papers, supervised by Professor Clayborn Carson of Stanford University and Professor Ralph Luker of Emory University. Their conduct is understandable but no less excusable than De Wolff's. First, they sat on the discovery; then they stonewalled; at last they dissembled, and when denial was no longer possible, they resorted to euphemisms. All talk of plagiarism was replaced by such phrases as "a pattern of textual appropriation." To be sure, they had a nasty shock. Innocently editing the papers of a great man, they discovered inexcusable conduct. To make it worse, the hero was a black hero. They could expect nothing but rage and resentment for exposing him. And nothing appears to reduce middle-class white academics to jelly more surely than the prospect of black anger -- even black student anger -- let alone the opprobrium they expected to follow upon the bringing down of a black hero.
Of course, they were wrong, and wrong in two ways. First, they had a moral obligation to the academy to expose intellectual fraud, an obligation that they ought to have discharged immediately once they were certain of their evidence, no matter how distasteful they might find the chore. Second, they badly misunderstood the historic public reaction to the exposure to all sorts of intellectual fraud, plagiarism included: yawning indifference.
The American press was little better. Among others, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the New Republic all sat on the story. It was left to a British journalist, Frank Johnson of the London Sunday Telegraph, to break the story. This was followed by several stories in Chronicles, a publication of the Rockford Institute, whose managing editor is Theodore Pappas, editor of the volume under review. No doubt the American press restrained itself for much the same reason as had the academics: fear of being charged with racism.
Pappas quotes The Sunday Telegraph's acid response to The Wall Street Journal's tepid story on the plagiarism: "Such is the cravenness of the U.S. media when it comes to race that no newspaper followed [our 1989] story.... Then, in an article full of apologetic mealy-mouthed phrases, The Wall Street Journal confirmed our findings." But there may well have been a secondary reason. Who cares about intellectual fraud? One of the strengths of Pappas's own essays in the book is his catalogue of plagiarisms and scientific frauds -- including the little-known fact that Coleridge plagiarized parts of his important work, Biographia Literaria.
Pappas points out that usually far less opprobrium attaches to plagiarists and frauds than to their exposers. It is as useful to have such a catalogue as it is to be told that "in rebutting J. C. Ferrier's relentless documentation of Coleridge's thefts, for example, Thomas McFarland contends that ‘It is surprising and rather anti-climactic’ to find that when all the firing is over Ferrier has discovered no more than nineteen pages of plagiarism in the hundreds that make up the Biographia Literaria." Pappas notes that the Boston University committee formed to investigate King's plagiarism puts forward a parallel argument. They say that King took only 45 percent of the first half of his thesis and only 21 percent of the second from Boozer. Therefore, the thesis remains an intelligent contribution to scholarship. With reasoning like that, and political correctness to boot, it is a wonder the U.S. press ever reported the story.
Pappas's book consists of twelve articles or letters concerning the King plagiarism, including seven of his own, all previously published. Through them the story flows smoothly. None appear to have been edited for this volume, and so there is inevitable repetition. In section 8, Pappas retracts his accusation that the historian David Garrow was one of those who tried to cover up the King plagiarism. In fact, he was one of the few who called it what it was. It would have been better, more graceful, for Pappas to have corrected the earlier assertion, which was left standing in the volume.
Note: This article was originally posted by Jeffyguy in the old JTF forum. With several new members in the present forum I am posting this again.
http://jewishtaskforce.proboards56.com/index.cgi?board=kushim&action=display&thread=1153570813
Topic: Martin Luther King Jr. Plagiarized His Thesis In School (Read 1903 times)