The problem of MLK's plagiarism

We’re not much these days for icons. Washington owned slaves, 
and Jefferson almost certainly slept with at least one of his 
slaves, whom he never freed. JFK was a serial philanderer, 
Tricky Dick actually was a crook, and MLK was an academic fraud 
no more entitled to be called Doctor King than I am.

Oh, wait, I forgot: King is our one remaining icon.

So, like the naked emperor’s subjects, we just don’t talk about 
the fact that, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica’s Executive 
Director Theodore Pappas, King lifted a mind-boggling 60% of his 
doctoral dissertation from other sources without crediting them.

While preparing his writings for publication in the late ’80s, 
the editors of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and 
Education Institute at Stanford noticed what they called 
“extensive plagiaries” in all his academic papers, including his 
dissertation. Stanford professor and Director of the King 
Institute Clayborne Carson found that both King’s student papers 
and his later essays and addresses all contained “numerous 
instances of plagiarism and, more generally, textual 
appropriation.”

In 1991, according to the New York Times, a panel of scholars at 
Boston University, appointed by the provost to study the alleged 
plagiarism in King’s dissertation, reported after a year’s study:

There is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the 
dissertation 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.

Civil rights historian Ralph E. Luker has written of his and 
Carson’s discovery of King’s horrendous plagiarism:

What became increasingly clear as we worked through the papers 
from King’s early career is that there were serious problems of 
plagiarism in his academic work. … [T]hey were a patchwork of 
his own language and the language of scholars, often without 
clear attribution. If anything, the pattern seemed to be that 
the more familiar King was with a subject, the less likely he 
was to plagiarize. On matters that were fairly alien to his 
experience, he borrowed heavily from others and often with only 
the slightest wink of attribution. To take two extreme examples, 
an autobiographical paper,”Autobiography of Religious 
Development” has no significant plagiarism in it; his paper on 
“The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism,” 
however, is composed almost exclusively of paragraphs lifted 
from the best secondary sources available to him. Moreover, the 
further King went in his academic career, the more deeply 
ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear 
attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation 
seemed to be, by then, the product of his long established 
practice. [Emphasis mine]

Incredibly, Boston University decided simply to put a note in 
King’s dissertation, pointing out the pervasive plagiarism, but 
found that revoking King’s doctorate would “serve no purpose.”

Say what?

We struggle with pandemic plagiarism in universities, but 
revoking the doctorate of a famous guy who stole most of his 
dissertation would serve no purpose? How about the purpose of 
sending a warning to students and researchers that we take 
cheating seriously? Or how about the simple purpose of 
intellectual honesty and truth-telling?

The civil rights movement is clearly an important part of our 
history. It’s probably important enough to deserve a day of 
celebration. (I hesitate only because, if it is, it’s odd that 
the enfranchisement of 51% of America, which didn’t occur until 
1920, apparently isn’t important enough to merit its own day of 
remembrance.) And MLK is certainly an appropriate symbol of the 
civil rights movement.

Does that mean we need to talk only about his tremendous 
accomplishments and hide his shocking lack of character?

No.

Let’s ditch the unfounded respect accorded to Rev. King by the 
title “Doctor.” He was a liar and a cheat. He didn’t earn the 
Ph.D. and he doesn’t deserve the title. He is as deeply flawed 
as most of our other national leaders. Let’s quit pretending 
otherwise.

http://crybelovedcountry.com/2012/01/the-problem-of-mlks-
plagiarism/
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