The official name of today’s day off for the federal bureaucracy is “Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.” His academic title, “Dr.,” is not included.
Did the sponsors of the legislation know something we didn’t know?
The holiday was proclaimed by Congress in 1983, after raucous debate (which I attended as a member of the Senate staff). Only eight years later was it publicly revealed that, as a graduate student, Mr. King (at the time) had plagiarized about a third to a half of his doctoral dissertation, lifting lengthy passages verbatim from the work of one Jack Boozer, a Boston University theology student who had graduated some years earlier. Mr. King submitted his plagiarized dissertation to his committee, which approved it, and he received his doctorate in systematic theology in 1955.
The fact that King had plagiarized his dissertation became known among academic circles not long after the holiday was declared, and word slowly spread.
In September 1990, Chronicles Magazine editor Thomas Fleming suggested that “King’s doctorate should be regarded as a courtesy title, since it had been recently revealed that he had plagiarized his dissertation.” Jon Westling, Interim President of Boston University at the time, objected in a letter to the magazine, asserting that, after a thorough review by experts, “’not a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has been identified.”
On December 10, the New York Times published a lengthy article (worth reading at length here) which began:
Torn between loyalty to his subject and to his discipline, the editor of the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reluctantly acknowledged yesterday that substantial parts of Dr. King’s doctoral dissertation and other academic papers from his student years appeared to have been plagiarized.
The historian, Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford University who was chosen in 1985 by Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, to head the King Papers Project, said that analysis of the papers by researchers working on the project had uncovered concepts, sentences and longer passages taken from other sources without attribution throughout Dr. King’s writings as a theology student.
Meanwhile, back at Boston University, Interim President Westling soon had to eat his words. In the magazine’s January 1991 issue, Theodore Pappas extensively documented for the first time the extent of King’s plagiarized material. (Pappas later wrote an even more extensive study of the saga, The Martin Luther King Jr. Plagiarism Story (Rockford Institute, Rockford, IL, 1994), with a timeline we rely on here).
By this time Boston University could no longer bury the issue. A fact-finding committee was established to review the allegations. Of course, the conclusion was a slam dunk, since major media outlets throughout the West had already reported on the story. Nonetheless, with a stiff upper lip, the University waited for an opportune time to admit publicly what it had long known privately.
Public Relations professionals would admire the path it chose: on October 11, 1991, the unprecedented media hype of Fake News featuring Anita Hill came to a cacophonous crescendo when she began her testimony opposing the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On the evening of that same day, Boston University quietly issued a press release stating that “the doctorate earned there by the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956 should not be revoked even though his dissertation contains plagiarisms that were revealed last year [sic], shocking admirers of the slain civil rights leader.”
At the time, I was teaching in Boston University’s Religion Department. At a school function, I saw Dr. John Silber, the university’s chancellor and longtime president, asked told me angrily, “How can you take a degree away from a dead man?” Dr. Silber went on to explain his view that it was King’s dissertation committee who was at fault, since its members failed to notice such gross misappropriation of materials from the work of one of their own students.
The protective silence of the university then continues today. Its website celebrating the school’s “diversity” states that “Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Boston University in 1951, searching for a multicultural community and a setting for his study of ethics and philosophy. He became “Dr. King” by earning a Ph.D. in systematic theology here in 1955.”
So today the federal bureaucracy has a day off thanks to the “Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.”
And “Doctor”?
Draw your own conclusions.
10:16 am on January 16, 2017
