I’ve heard it claimed that Dr. King plagiarised his Ph.D dissertation at BU. What’s the straightdope on it?
Here’s Snopes on the question:
And here’s Cecil:
Thanks Captain! I had heard about his womanizing, and the same readers on the 2 theses. Interesting the contradicting takes on his “I Have a Dream” plagiarizing.
It will be interesting when everything ever written has been scanned and stored, to see what other Great Thinkers stole from each other. I would be a lot.
I think of it this way: Who has ever claimed that King was a deep, important researcher who discovered tremendous, original new insights in his academic work? Clearly he wasn’t. Who has ever claimed that King’s speeches were brilliant original insights on racial affairs in the U.S. that nobody has ever considered before? Clearly they weren’t. King was a brilliant orator who could express ideas about his hopes for racial equality (which everybody who had thought for a few minutes about would have known that they should be doing something about) in inspiring speeches. He was also a brilliant movement organizer. Who cares about the quality of his research, the originality of the phrases in his speeches, or the messiness of his sexual life?
One of the links (Cecil I believe) basically says he was a minister, not an academic.
If he submitted a doctoral thesis as his own, he did.
It doesn’t invalidate everything he did for civil rights. It does invalidate his claim to a doctoral degree. In that area of his life, he was a liar and thief. It does not seem to me to be a little white lie - plagiarism is a serious thing.
Regards,
Shodan
The people who are bringing up the point about plagiarism in the thesis are not academics who are angry that King got a Ph.D. for a third-rate job of research. The people who are bringing up the issue are people who don’t like King for other reasons. They are ones who are angry about having to commemorate King with a holiday. They don’t apply the same standards to Washington and Columbus, who also get a holiday named for them. If we applied the same standards to Washington and Columbus, we could easily find things that show that they are also less than perfect people. If the people who are complaining about King were consistent, they would demand that every Ph.D. thesis ever written should undergo the same scrutiny that King’s has. That’s not what these people want. They want to look for every issue that they can think of to criticize King because they don’t like his leadership of the civil rights movement.
I’d love to discuss this subject without ideological biases, if possible, because the larger subject interests me, namely: is closer scrutiny an appropriate or an inappropriate cost of greater fame? I’ve raised the subject of King’s dissertation, and BU’s decision against revoking his doctorate, in academic settings with no preconceived answer in my own mind, mainly because I think both sides of the argument have merit. King’s doctorate should have been revoked because that’s most likely what BU would have done if someone else’s dissertation (i.e. that of a non-saint, non-martyr, non-hero) had been shown to have been plagiarized, but I also see where BU’s revocation of his Ph.D. would have been misused by his racist, reactionary, mouth-breathing, hateful enemies. I honestly don’t know which side I come down on finally. The larger issue isn’t so much whether celebrities of all sorts get special treatment (they do) but whether that special treatment is more beneficial than not.
I have always considered MLK primarily as a preacher/clergyman. Of course, he was a terrific speaker and organizer and was able to rouse fervor that others could not, but his fundamental principles don’t seem to me to be very original and I wouldn’t consider him to have made a )scholarly_ breakthrough on any social matter, but rather a social one.
I’ve never heard of the plagiarism accusation - I’ll have to check it out.
The truth or otherwise of a proposition is independent of the speaker. The person saying that MLK was a plagiarist could be the worst bigot on God’s green earth, and it would still be true.
Every thesis ever written should be so examined. And when plagiarism is found, that thesis is invalid for the purposes of qualifying for a Ph.D. Even if the person in question did an enormous amount for civil rights in the US.
That’s as may be, but the question in the OP is not “Does MLK Jr. deserve his own holiday?” That would be a GD question. The GQ question is “Did MLK Jr. plagiarize his thesis?”, and, no matter the motives of the asker, the answer seems to be Yes.
Like I said, it does not mean he wasn’t a great civil rights leader and a great American. But Jefferson had a slave mistress. FDR cheated on his wife. LBJ got rich off some shady deals with a radio station. These things are all true, and they have little to do with the Declaration of Independence or the Louisiana Purchase or leading the nation thru WWII or the Great Society.
Regards,
Shodan
[Moderator Note]
Right. In this thread, let’s stick to the factual aspects of question in the OP. Those who wish to debate the moral aspects of King’s acts, how that affects his legacy, and the political motivations of his detractors should start another thread in GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
That was my intention in the paragraph you quoted, which accounts for the GQ/GD references.
Regards,
Shodan
It may be a bit of a tangent, but I think we need to discuss the differences in Snopes’ and Cecil’s articles. Cecil claims that the speech was also plagiarized, while Snopes says otherwise. Assuming they are talking about the same supposed source speech, Snopes is obviously correct. But does Cecil have more information?
What does it even mean to plagiarize a speech which uses a lot of standard quotations from another speech which uses a lot of standard quotations? This is trying to apply the standards of academic writing to sermonizing.
The point remains, that to qualify for a PhD one must meet the criteria, and it does not matter how the plagiarism came about, it invalidates that part of the work, and may indeed be enough to disqualify any other work made in support of the same thesis, as is often the case regarding plagiarism, it is part of the disincentive to do it.
Unnattributed quotations are plagiarism, like it or not.
I’m not sure of the exact details at the moment, but didn’t Ralph Abernathy mention something about this in his memoirs or something, essentially saying that MLK did plagiarise?
casdave, what does “[it] may indeed be enough to disqualify any other work made in support of the same thesis” mean in reference to King’s thesis. He didn’t have any published academic papers. Are you claiming that because he plagiarized his thesis, everything else he ever said or wrote is invalid? If that’s not what you mean, then what precisely do you mean?
As I said, plagiarism of short phrases in sermons, which is what the “I Have a Dream” speech essentially is, doesn’t have any relevance.
The Snopes article contains passages from the two speechs.
Here’s what Archibald Carey said in 1952:
And here’s what Martin Luther King said in 1968:
It’s not a word-for-word repeat but I’d say King copied the idea of the speech. The elements are too similar: the idea of disenfranchised people singing “My Country 'Tis of Thee”; the invocation of mountains in the northern part of the country leading to the invocation of mountains in the southern part of the country; and the ending that this is a call for all people not just Black Americans.
To answer you Wendell, if you present a PhD paper with a significant component of plagiarism, and that paper is part of a collection of other works which may well be original, you may find that under the terms of the awarding body, all the work will be disqualified and not just the plagiarised parts.
I do not know the speifics of Kings work, or the awarding institution but there isn’t really any excuse for it.
The question that would have to be addressed here depend very much on the criteria, after all, it would be virtually impossible to advance the work of, say, the bible, without quoting, nor possible to advance an interpretation of its values without quoting, and one could reasonably argue that this work is so well known it needs little or no attribution.