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Thread ID: 7200 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-06-07
2003-06-07 17:39 | User Profile
**In response to the University of Nebraska's proposal to make Martin Luther King's birthday an official University holiday, we here present the MLK plagiarism page, on which we'll be documenting MLK's long career of misrepresenting other writers' work as his own. The page is still under construction. When it is complete, it will compare in detail excerpts of King's works with those of previous authors, showing how King lifted sentences, phrases and entire paragraphs from texts like Paul Ramsey's 'Basic Christian Ethics' (sheesh!). It will show how whole chunks of MLK's doctoral thesis were copied from the thesis of another student, and from the works of eminent theologians. It will show how his early graduate and even undergraduate student papers were filched, and how King's plagiarism extended into his later career, and the works he wrote after he became famous.
.....
King chose the topic of his dissertation - A comparison of the conception of God in the thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman - in the winter of 1953. He contacted the two proposed subjects (victims?) in the summer of '53 to ask them if anyone had tried similarly to compare their ideas. His thesis outline was approved in April 1954, and the first draft of the thesis was produced ('written' is probably the wrong word!) by November 1954. His readers suggested a few small corrections and the final draft was submitted to Boston University in April 1955. The King Papers project relates how King managed to generate 'his' first draft so efficiently. He took notes from his sources onto a series of notecards, and then transcribed the notecards directly into his thesis. Sometimes he didn't indicate on the cards that what he was writing was a direct transcription; sometimes he did include quotation marks on the cards, but then omitted them in the thesis.
The dissertation is a result heavily plagiarized. The King Papers Project in 1991 estimated that 52% of Chapter 2 of the thesis was plagiarized - transcribed from the work of other authors without any indication that the section was an exact reproduction. Looking over the complete annotated version of his thesis, it is clear that in places page upon successive page is composed of concatenated sequences of stolen quotations, with King contributing literally nothing to the text other than by arranging the words of others. A full estimate of the proportion of King's original work in the thesis will require a computer analysis, but it is not high. The main sources for King's appropriations were:
Various published works by Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, the subjects of the dissertation "Tillich's role in Contemporary Theology", an essay by Walter Marshall Horton in The theology of Paul Tillich , edited by Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (New York: Macmillan, 1952). Horton was a favorite 'source' of King's; he'd cribbed large chunks of Horton's work in previous graduate student essays, and in fact virtually the entire first draft of his introduction was swiped from this article. Several other theologians and philosophers, and, worst of all... "The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich's Concept of God", by Jack Stewart Boozer (Ph. D. dissertation, Boston University, 1952). Yes, that's right, a hefty chunk of King's thesis was transcribed from a recent thesis of another Boston University student. Jack Boozer was a theology student who interrupted his studies at B.U. to serve as an army chaplain in Europe from 1944 to 1947. He returned to B.U in 1948, and got his Ph. D. in 1952. He went on to be a Professor of Religion at Emory. In his introduction King had the nerve to write "In 1952 a very fine dissertation was done in this school by Jack Boozer...". He must certainly have thought so; he used literally thousands of words from that dissertaion in his own thesis! **
[url=http://chem-gharbison.unl.edu/mlk/thesis.html]http://chem-gharbison.unl.edu/mlk/thesis.html[/url]
2003-06-07 22:35 | User Profile
Why, those damn racists! How dare they expose the [url=http://christianparty.net/mlk.htm]truth[/url] about Saint Martin! I'm calling the NAACP and reporting this as a hate crime!