The Academic Creed
in Theory and Practice
Ed. Note: The Foundation is very disturbed about why a man with apparently very little integrity, is considered a national icon, and has a national holiday named for him. There are a large number of black men who deserve greater recognition than this man.
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| Martin Luther King, Jr. in Academic Attire |
The Plagiarism of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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 (BU) 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and professor of history at Stanford University, found additionally that King's student essays and published and unpublished addresses and essays all contain "numerous instances of plagiarism and, more generally, textual appropriation."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).