A committee of scholars established by Boston University to investigate charges that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarized significant portions of his doctoral dissertation has concluded that the document does contain substantial “misappropriation” of others’ writings.
“There is no question,” the committee said in a report issued last week, “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.”
The committee recommended that a letter, stating that the document contained “improprieties” in its citations, be placed with the official copy of King’s dissertation in the university library. King received a doctorate in theology from Boston University in 1955.
Plagiarism in the dissertation and in other student papers King wrote was first discovered by researchers at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University.
Clayborne Carson, a historian who is director of the King Papers Project, published an initial report of the findings in the June 1991 issue of The Journal of American History. Complete details will appear in the relevant volume of the King papers, which is expected to be published next year.
When reports of the plagiarism first became public a year ago, Boston University officials asked four theology professors -- three on its own faculty and one at American University -- to examine the allegations specifically concerning the dissertation. The four scholars have substantially corroborated what Mr. Carson and his colleagues found.
“It’s a fair reading of the evidence,” Mr. Carson said of the Boston University report, “and about what I would have expected them to conclude.”
The committee also noted that, at the time King was a student there, Boston University had explicit rules about citation and offered an explanatory course that King attended.
“Dr. King is responsible,” the report said, “for knowingly misappropriating the borrowed materials that he failed to cite or to cite adequately.”
Committee members did say that, while King repeatedly misappropriated the words of his sources, he did not try to pass others’ ideas off as his own.
Revelation of the plagiarism has raised questions about the adequacy of the supervision of King’s work. The committee said it found no evidence that the two faculty readers of the dissertation, L. Harold DeWolf and S. Paul Schilling, had breached normal standards of academic supervision. Committee members suggested that the plagiarism had not been caught because no one had reason to be suspicious.
The committee rejected out of hand any suggestion that King’s degree should be revoked, partly because such a move is virtually unheard of and partly because, despite the inadequate citations, the dissertation “makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship.”
“To some extent, we’re talking about a very curious precedent,” John H. Cartwright, a professor of social ethics at Boston and one of the members of the committee, said in an interview.
Mr. Carson agreed. “There’s just no way they could retroactively make a judgment about the awarding of the doctorate,” he said, “because King’s not around to defend himself.”
