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Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Other Prominent Americans
Plagiarism and the Culture The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans by Theodore Pappas 1998 Paperback 0-87319-045-9
212 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1998
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June 14, 2024
A VERY UNSYMPATHETIC PORTRAYAL OF THE ISSUE
Editor (and author of much of this book) Theodore D. Pappas is executive editor and chief development officer of Encyclopædia Britannica, and was formerly managing editor of the conservative magazine ‘Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.’
He wrote in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of this 1994 book, “There could be no more thankless enterprise or reckless pursuit, no endeavor more potentially destructive of personal and professional ties, than a sustained critical study of such a hallowed figure as Martin Luther King Jr. The foolishness of such a venture is doubtless obvious by the host of nationally influential editors and publishers who knew about this story as well as of its veracity but who nevertheless suppressed it and continue to whitewash it today.”
He states in the Introduction, “We now know that Martin Luther King Jr. routinely plagiarized not only his college, seminary, and graduate school essays, including his doctoral dissertation, but many of his most famous speeches and published works as well, including the legendary ‘I Have a Dream’ oration… Fraud and plagiarism in the literary, scientific, and scholarly worlds are more prominent and prolific than generally realized, and the way in which many cases of impropriety have been ignored, whitewashed, and covered up by the press, by editors, by publishers, and by universities has only aggravated the problem and encouraged such perfidy.” (Pg. 26)
He continues, “My argument [is] twofold: that, regardless of how one felt about King’s historical role as a leader of a social movement, his blatant plagiarizing in pursuit of America’s highest academic degree---specifically, his stealing of large sections of a dissertation by Jack Boozer---was an indefensible act that should warrant the revocation of his Ph.D.; and that Boston University could posthumously award King an honorary doctorate for his contribution t civil rights but that it had an obligation as an institution devoted to the pursuit fo truth to revile and revoke what was fraudulently earned.” (Pg. 30)
He observes, “The committee that Boston University convened to investigate King’s plagiarisms… [concluded] in its September 1991 report… Because King stole only 45 percent of his thesis’s first half, and only 21 percent of the second, the dissertation remains an ‘intelligent contribution to scholarship,’ and ‘no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree… What kind of numbers would have to be posted to impress that university? Say, plagiarism covering 65 percent of the first half and 45 percent of the second?” (Pg. 33)
He summarizes, “in the country with ostensibly the freest and most adversarial press in the world, many of our leading journals and newspapers know about King’s plagiarism and the extent of the transgressions but deliberately spiked and suppressed the story… Harboring fraud and deception is bad enough. Calling them scholarship and truth signals the end of the academy and intellectual discourse as we know them.” (Pg. 38-39)
The 1989 article by Frank Johnson states, “Researchers in his native Georgia must soon decide whether to reveal that the late Dr. Martin Luther King… was---in addition to his other human failings---a plagiarist. There is now much doubt as to whether his Ph.D. thesis was really his own work. In my view this does not detract from his greatness, no more than did the revelations about his extramarital sex life. But it is causing anguish among scholars working on his collected papers… According to my informant, the associate editor of the project… has discovered that Dr. King’s thesis at Boston University in the early 1950s---on the theological concept known as ‘personalism’---lent heavily on the work, a few years before, of a white student, Jack Boozer, who went on to become a professor at Emory… Apparently, King mentioned Boozer’s work in a footnote, but did not indicate the extent to which the thesis came from him.” (Pg. 43-44)
Pappas states in another article, “King received a Boston University Ph.D. in theology for a 1955 dissertation entitled ‘A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.’ According to the rumor, King’s discussion of Tillich was based on a dissertation by one Jack Stewart Boozer entitled ‘The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Concept of God,’ for which Boozer was awarded a Ph.D. in theology from Boston University in 1952… Despite the serious nature of the charge, more than nine months have passed and no scholarly article has appeared and no discussion of the charges has occurred in our nation’s press. The question is, are we dealing with a substantial case of plagiarism or merely an instance of careless documentation?... Even so, it is possible to borrow a man’s ideas, arguments, and evidence but paraphrase his actual language in a way that manages to stop short of plagiarism.” (Pg. 48-49)
He continues, “whole phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs are lifted verbatim from Boozer’s text… King acknowledges, on page five, that a ‘fine’ dissertation was done on Tillich in 1952. And King does say on page seven that ‘the present inquiry will utilize from these valuable secondary sources any results which bear directly on the problem, and will indicate such use by appropriate footnotes.’ King, however, does not do this. In fact, among the dozens of sections he lifts from Boozer, he footnotes Boozer only twice…” (Pg. 50) He suggests, “King’s tactic of pasting together disparate sections of Boozer’s text, in this case sections that are more than one hundred pages apart… could not have been done without great circumspection and forethought.” (Pg. 54)
He reprints the Wall Street Journal’s front-page article of November 9, 1990, by Peter Waldman, which notes, “It is doubtful the Mr. King intended to slip anything past his dissertation adviser, L. Harold DeWolf. Three years before Mr. King completed his dissertation, Mr. DeWolf had been the doctoral adviser for a student named jack Boozer, author of the dissertation that Mr. King so heavily relied on in parts of his own. (Mr. Boozer died in 1989. His wife, Ruth, says he learned about the project’s findings shortly before his death. ‘He told me he’s be so honored and so glad if there were anything that Martin Luther King could have used from his work,’ she says.) Mr. Carson [senior editor of the MLK Papers Project] guesses that Mr. King didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. ‘The best evidence for that,’ he says, ‘is that he saved his papers and donated them to an archive---at [Boston University], of all places.’” (Pg. 66)
Pappas asserts, “King’s plagiarisms are easy to detect because their style rises above the level of his pedestrian student prose. In general, if the sentences are eloquent, witty, insightful, or pithy, or contain allusions, analogies, metaphors, or similes, it is safe to assume that the section has been purloined.” (Pg. 90)
He notes, “Eugene Genovese also admits King’s pilferage, but writes off its significance as a mere ‘impatience with scholarly procedures,’ something that should not diminish our appreciation of King’s ‘fine’ mind. After all, King may have plagiarized his way through college, seminary, and graduate school, but this was ‘not an expression of laziness or an unwillingness to do the required work’! How can we ever know?” (Pg. 93)
He concludes, “These embarrassing exonerations are rationalizations of King’s plagiarisms are more damaging to blacks than in B.U. had revoked King’s doctorate. For by excusing King’s pilferings… King’s apologists are telling black scholars everywhere that they shouldn’t bother doing their own work, or worse, that no black can really pull his own weight, write his papers, or actually become a professional like white people can… these specious attempts to exonerate King are … strikingly similar to many other acts of penitence---such as affirmative action, quotas, and the race-norming of government exams---that a guilt-ridden white community has felt duty-bound to perform in expiation of racial sins, both real and imagined.” (Pg. 103-104)
Despite Pappas’s antipathy toward King, this book quotes some more sympathetic voices, and—since there is little published in book form on this subject---therefore will also be of some interest to those sympathetic to King, as well as being a very welcome book to King’s many critics.
Editor (and author of much of this book) Theodore D. Pappas is executive editor and chief development officer of Encyclopædia Britannica, and was formerly managing editor of the conservative magazine ‘Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.’
He wrote in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of this 1994 book, “There could be no more thankless enterprise or reckless pursuit, no endeavor more potentially destructive of personal and professional ties, than a sustained critical study of such a hallowed figure as Martin Luther King Jr. The foolishness of such a venture is doubtless obvious by the host of nationally influential editors and publishers who knew about this story as well as of its veracity but who nevertheless suppressed it and continue to whitewash it today.”
He states in the Introduction, “We now know that Martin Luther King Jr. routinely plagiarized not only his college, seminary, and graduate school essays, including his doctoral dissertation, but many of his most famous speeches and published works as well, including the legendary ‘I Have a Dream’ oration… Fraud and plagiarism in the literary, scientific, and scholarly worlds are more prominent and prolific than generally realized, and the way in which many cases of impropriety have been ignored, whitewashed, and covered up by the press, by editors, by publishers, and by universities has only aggravated the problem and encouraged such perfidy.” (Pg. 26)
He continues, “My argument [is] twofold: that, regardless of how one felt about King’s historical role as a leader of a social movement, his blatant plagiarizing in pursuit of America’s highest academic degree---specifically, his stealing of large sections of a dissertation by Jack Boozer---was an indefensible act that should warrant the revocation of his Ph.D.; and that Boston University could posthumously award King an honorary doctorate for his contribution t civil rights but that it had an obligation as an institution devoted to the pursuit fo truth to revile and revoke what was fraudulently earned.” (Pg. 30)
He observes, “The committee that Boston University convened to investigate King’s plagiarisms… [concluded] in its September 1991 report… Because King stole only 45 percent of his thesis’s first half, and only 21 percent of the second, the dissertation remains an ‘intelligent contribution to scholarship,’ and ‘no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree… What kind of numbers would have to be posted to impress that university? Say, plagiarism covering 65 percent of the first half and 45 percent of the second?” (Pg. 33)
He summarizes, “in the country with ostensibly the freest and most adversarial press in the world, many of our leading journals and newspapers know about King’s plagiarism and the extent of the transgressions but deliberately spiked and suppressed the story… Harboring fraud and deception is bad enough. Calling them scholarship and truth signals the end of the academy and intellectual discourse as we know them.” (Pg. 38-39)
The 1989 article by Frank Johnson states, “Researchers in his native Georgia must soon decide whether to reveal that the late Dr. Martin Luther King… was---in addition to his other human failings---a plagiarist. There is now much doubt as to whether his Ph.D. thesis was really his own work. In my view this does not detract from his greatness, no more than did the revelations about his extramarital sex life. But it is causing anguish among scholars working on his collected papers… According to my informant, the associate editor of the project… has discovered that Dr. King’s thesis at Boston University in the early 1950s---on the theological concept known as ‘personalism’---lent heavily on the work, a few years before, of a white student, Jack Boozer, who went on to become a professor at Emory… Apparently, King mentioned Boozer’s work in a footnote, but did not indicate the extent to which the thesis came from him.” (Pg. 43-44)
Pappas states in another article, “King received a Boston University Ph.D. in theology for a 1955 dissertation entitled ‘A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.’ According to the rumor, King’s discussion of Tillich was based on a dissertation by one Jack Stewart Boozer entitled ‘The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Concept of God,’ for which Boozer was awarded a Ph.D. in theology from Boston University in 1952… Despite the serious nature of the charge, more than nine months have passed and no scholarly article has appeared and no discussion of the charges has occurred in our nation’s press. The question is, are we dealing with a substantial case of plagiarism or merely an instance of careless documentation?... Even so, it is possible to borrow a man’s ideas, arguments, and evidence but paraphrase his actual language in a way that manages to stop short of plagiarism.” (Pg. 48-49)
He continues, “whole phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs are lifted verbatim from Boozer’s text… King acknowledges, on page five, that a ‘fine’ dissertation was done on Tillich in 1952. And King does say on page seven that ‘the present inquiry will utilize from these valuable secondary sources any results which bear directly on the problem, and will indicate such use by appropriate footnotes.’ King, however, does not do this. In fact, among the dozens of sections he lifts from Boozer, he footnotes Boozer only twice…” (Pg. 50) He suggests, “King’s tactic of pasting together disparate sections of Boozer’s text, in this case sections that are more than one hundred pages apart… could not have been done without great circumspection and forethought.” (Pg. 54)
He reprints the Wall Street Journal’s front-page article of November 9, 1990, by Peter Waldman, which notes, “It is doubtful the Mr. King intended to slip anything past his dissertation adviser, L. Harold DeWolf. Three years before Mr. King completed his dissertation, Mr. DeWolf had been the doctoral adviser for a student named jack Boozer, author of the dissertation that Mr. King so heavily relied on in parts of his own. (Mr. Boozer died in 1989. His wife, Ruth, says he learned about the project’s findings shortly before his death. ‘He told me he’s be so honored and so glad if there were anything that Martin Luther King could have used from his work,’ she says.) Mr. Carson [senior editor of the MLK Papers Project] guesses that Mr. King didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. ‘The best evidence for that,’ he says, ‘is that he saved his papers and donated them to an archive---at [Boston University], of all places.’” (Pg. 66)
Pappas asserts, “King’s plagiarisms are easy to detect because their style rises above the level of his pedestrian student prose. In general, if the sentences are eloquent, witty, insightful, or pithy, or contain allusions, analogies, metaphors, or similes, it is safe to assume that the section has been purloined.” (Pg. 90)
He notes, “Eugene Genovese also admits King’s pilferage, but writes off its significance as a mere ‘impatience with scholarly procedures,’ something that should not diminish our appreciation of King’s ‘fine’ mind. After all, King may have plagiarized his way through college, seminary, and graduate school, but this was ‘not an expression of laziness or an unwillingness to do the required work’! How can we ever know?” (Pg. 93)
He concludes, “These embarrassing exonerations are rationalizations of King’s plagiarisms are more damaging to blacks than in B.U. had revoked King’s doctorate. For by excusing King’s pilferings… King’s apologists are telling black scholars everywhere that they shouldn’t bother doing their own work, or worse, that no black can really pull his own weight, write his papers, or actually become a professional like white people can… these specious attempts to exonerate King are … strikingly similar to many other acts of penitence---such as affirmative action, quotas, and the race-norming of government exams---that a guilt-ridden white community has felt duty-bound to perform in expiation of racial sins, both real and imagined.” (Pg. 103-104)
Despite Pappas’s antipathy toward King, this book quotes some more sympathetic voices, and—since there is little published in book form on this subject---therefore will also be of some interest to those sympathetic to King, as well as being a very welcome book to King’s many critics.
January 21, 2015
Didn't really hold my interest. The fact that MLK plagiarized virtually everything he wrote, most importantly his I Have a Dream Speech and his 1955 PhD Doctoral Dissertation, was interesting, but that's really all this book brought to the table. Honestly, it quite quickly delved in to a study of plagiarism and how some people feel plagiarism is acceptable and others do not. Yes, the MLK component was riveting, but at some point, you have to just let things go. As a writer, I'm not sure that Mr. Pappas can ignore the fact that, outside of the literary world, plagiarism isn't as big of a deal as he wishes it would be.
February 24, 2009
Very good.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews