Why do liberals celebrate a negro lying cheating and stealing on MLK day?

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 
movement is not in the least diminished by the ethical 
shortcomings of one of its leaders.

But more than that, American culture has personified the virtues 
of the Civil Rights movement - tolerance, nonviolence, and 
insistence on the integrity of the individual - in Martin Luther 
King Jr. That mythic King bears little resemblance to the real, 
the historical Martin Luther King Jr.

It would be safe and easy for UNL to play along with this 
comfortable myth.

But we shouldn't.

Plagiarism isn't a mere peccadillo. It is a direct threat to our 
academic integrity. When a student plagiarizes, he undermines 
academic standards by receiving a grade for ideas or expression 
that are not his own, and he cheats other students who have 
earned their grades honestly.

When a scholar plagiarizes, he defrauds other scholars of due 
credit for their work, and he contaminates scholarship by making 
it difficult or impossible to trace the evolution of ideas.

Remember how major-league baseball banned Pete Rose? Rose 
gambled on games, a minor transgression to most, but one that 
baseball felt undermined its the very integrity. In the same 
way, plagiarism subverts our integrity. Surely UNL can at least 
aspire to the same standards as organized baseball?

More than this, as scholars we have a responsibility to separate 
myth from truth. For example, we insist on making a distinction 
between creation myths and the scientific truth of evolution. 
Even though some of our students adhere to the biblical story of 
creation - and when we teach evolution we may cause offense and 
do violence to their beliefs - we can't fail to teach and 
research the truth out of a misplaced 'sensitivity.'

In the same way, we have a responsibility to confront Martin 
Luther King Jr. as the man he was, not the icon some of us 
revere.

Our chancellor insists we can diversify UNL without compromising 
academic standards. But if so, how can we, in the name of 
diversity, declare an academic holiday to honor a man whose 
entire career was marred by the most blatant academic dishonesty?

I personally have had one student expelled, and flunked several 
others, for turning in plagiarized papers. Can we really look 
those students in the face, insist that what they did was 
seriously wrong, and then in good conscience vote for a King 
holiday?

I don't think so.

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