Why Plagiarism Matters

How do we know what we think we know? Where do facts come from? How do fact-checkers determine what facts are facts? For almost a thousand years civilization has relied on Doctors of Philosophy to produce scholarship on every imaginable topic.1 Given the fact that our laws and public policies are often based on their scholarship it is vital that these experts be held to the highest academic standards. In the event that an institution of higher learning determines that a current or past P.h.D. candidate is guilty of ‘material plagerism’2 or fabrication of evidence, that finding should be made available to the public. Policymakers, journalists, and the general public have a vested interest in their past, current, and future scholarship.

For example, in the early 1900s, John Augustine Ryan wrote his dissertation about a concept he called a ‘living wage’ and his scholarship resulted in the adoption of the minimum wage in America.3 Alan Turing’s dissertation formed the basis for modern computing and was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany in the 40s. Rebecca Mercuri’s dissertation revolutionized ballot security and the method she proposed for voter-verified paper ballots has been adopted globally.4 The credibility of these scholars was vital to the acceptance and implementation of their scholarship.

Each year American universities award +/- 55,000 new P.h.Ds to scholars who dedicate six to eight years of rigorous, extensive, and original research to become an ‘expert’ in a particular field. Upon completion of their full-time multi-year research effort, these scholars must complete a written dissertation or thesis ranging from 200 pages for quantitative research papers to 400 pages for qualitative papers and represent the capstone of their scholarly efforts. Before their university will recognize their efforts the scholar must defend their thesis in front of a panel of examiners and only after successfully doing so will they confer a Doctor of Philosophy or Ph.D.5

With the advent of ProQuest6 and other digital repositories for dissertations more and more cases of plagiarism and academic dishonesty are coming to light. Almost fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded his P.h.D. Boston University determined that he had relied on plagiarism throughout his academic career including most shockingly in his dissertation. For example, Dr. King’s introduction was copied verbatim from an article by Walter Marshall Horton. Ultimately the school decided to include a note in Dr. King’s dissertation detailing his academic dishonesty but took no further action against the civil rights leader who has died years earlier.7

If universities are to maintain their credibility and the credibility of honorable scholars they must be transparent about cases of material academic dishonesty committed by past or present P.h.Ds. - cases of non-material plagiarism should be reported publicly on a case-by-case basis. Today most universities keep cases of material plagiarism confidential inadvertently undermining the credibility of all P.h.D.s and their scholarship.

Do you agree or disagree?

Allan Noble, Keith (2001). Changing doctoral degrees: an international perspective, Society for Research into Higher Education, 1994, p. 8; Bourner, T., Bowden, R., & Laing, S. (2001). "Professional doctorates in England. Studies in Higher Education. Vol. 26. pp. 65–88. doi:10.1080/03075070020030724

Material Plagerism is “knowingly presenting someone else’s ideas, research, or words as your own. Copying/downloading/buying an entire paper or part of a paper that was written by someone else, and turning it in with your name on it is plagiarism. Intentionally not giving proper credit for a source: Intentionally incorporating someone else's concepts or words into your own paper without giving that person credit with an appropriate citation is plagiarism.” [source] As opposed to unintentional plagiarism…

“John Augustine Ryan was a leading Catholic priest who was a noted moral theologian, professor, author and advocate of social justice. While Ryan identified himself primarily as a moral theologian, he also made important contributions to American political life and economic thought. He supported a number of social reforms that were eventually incorporated into the New Deal, and have become elemental to the modern welfare state. Ryan’s most well-known contribution to American economic thought was his argument for a minimum wage presented in his doctoral dissertation, A Living Wage.” [source]

“Mercuri's 2001 dissertation springboarded her research into computer security, especially in electronic voting where she has been researching, writing about, and testifying since 1989. She is known to have popularized the idea of using voter-verified paper ballots, whereby an electronic voting machine prints a paper ballot under transparent glass or plastic for the voter to verify before casting their vote (often referred to as the "Mercuri method").” [source]

Haidar, Hasna. “What Is a Ph.D.?” Top Universities, 12 May 2022, https://www.topuniversities.com/blog/what-phd.

https://www.proquest.com/

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute:

“Scholarship by the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project of the King Institute has revealed that as a student at Crozer and Boston, King frequently appropriated the words of other writers without proper attribution. Volumes I and II of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., have demonstrated that while his bibliographies contained the authors and books that he drew on in his own compositions, his papers often lacked the footnotes and quotation marks that identified his use of these sources in his text. His habit of plagiarizing others’ work, intentionally or not, can be found in the various drafts of his dissertation. King borrowed from several secondary sources without proper citation, including a dissertation written by fellow Crozer student Jack Boozer for DeWolf three years earlier, and a review of Tillich’s Systematic Theology written by one of King’s former professors.”

The following ‘note’ was added to King’s 1955 dissertation:

In the winter of 1953 King chose his dissertation topic and enrolled in the required course Directed Study in Thesis and Dissertation Writing taught by Jannette E. Newhall. Working with Newhall and DeWolf, King developed a bibliography, a preliminary organizational outline, and a short introduction. During the summer of I953 King contacted Wieman and Tillich to ask if they knew of any similar comparisons of their thought. Beyond these exploratory letters, though, the newly married King did not work on the dissertation while serving as pastor in charge of Ebenezer during the summer. After studying during the fall and winter, King passed his final comprehensive examination in February 1954 and began working extensively on the dissertation. On 9 April, just a few days after he accepted the call to Dexter, King’s outline was approved by the Graduate School.
In the first chapter, after explaining his choice of the topic, King reviewed his sources. In the second chapter he explored the methodologies of the two theologians. By using a “method of correlation” Tillich sought first to describe the questions generated by the human condition and then to examine the specifically Christian symbols used to answer those questions. Wieman appealed to the scientific method, using “sensory observation, experimental behavior, and rational inference” to analyze Christian beliefs. In chapters 3 and 4 King described Tillich’s and Wieman’s conceptions of God. In the fifth chapter he compared and criticized their ideas.
King’s initial drafts of the dissertation were marked by the flawed citation practices that characterized his other academic essays and the final version of the dissertation. King appropriated virtually all of his first draft of the introduction verbatim from an article by Walter Marshall Horton. Newhall noted that in one of King’s footnotes he cited a source not listed in the bibliography.’ King corrected the error in later versions, but the introduction still contained several plagiarized passages.
King’s faulty citation practices were rooted in the notecards he created while conducting research on Tillich and Wieman. Large sections of the expository chapters are verbatim transcriptions of these notecards, in which errors he had made while creating his notes are perpetuated. In one case, although King properly quoted Tillich on the notecard, he used a section of the quotation in the dissertation without quotation marks. Some of the notecards were adequately paraphrased from Tillich and Wieman, but many others were nearly identical to the source. King rarely noted down proper citations as he took notes, particularly from secondary sources. After reading an author’s interpretation of a Tillich quotation, for example, King would transcribe the interpretation, the Tillich quotation, and the footnote to Tillich’s writings but would neglect to mention the secondary source. One of his most important uncredited sources was a Boston University dissertation on Tillich that DeWolf had readjust three years before. In the introduction King noted his reliance on “valuable secondary sources” and acknowledged Jack Boozer’s “very fine” dissertation; thereafter, however, King obscured the extent to which he utilized this secondary source by citing it only twice. He also relied heavily on a review of Tillich’s Systematic Theology by Raphael Demos, King’s professor at Harvard, and on several essays in a collection entitled The Theology of Paul Tillich, underreporting these sources in his citations.
King completed his draft of the dissertation while serving as the full-time pastor of Dexter. “I rose every morning at five-thirty and spent three hours writing the thesis,” he later wrote, “returning to it late at night for another three hours.” In November 1954, several month after leaving Boston, King returned to that city for consultations with DeWolf and Schilling.
DeWolf and Schilling had mostly praise for King’s draft, pointing out only minor changes necessary for their approval. In characteristically brief fashion, DeWolf returned King’s draft with very few corrections or marginal comments, praising King for succeeding “with broad learning, impressive ability and convincing mastery of the works immediately involved.’’ Schilling, evaluating one of his first dissertations as a professor, provided more extensive comments than DeWolf. In two instances Schilling noticed that King had improperly cited his sources by “inaccurately” quoting a Tillich text and omitting quotation marks around another paragraph. Acknowledging that the first draft was “competently done, . . . carefully organized and systematically developed,” Schilling promised to approve the dissertation after the appropriate changes were made. King incorporated many of these corrections, but made few other changes as he revised the dissertation.
After submitting the final draft sometime before the 15 April deadline, King returned to Boston to defend his work before an examining committee. Chaired by Schilling, the committee included DeWolf, Peter A. Bertocci, John H. Lavely, Richard M. Millard, and Newhall. On 31 May the graduate school faculty of Boston University officially voted to confer the doctorate on King at the university’s commencement on 5 June. Unable to be present for the service, King received the Ph.D. in systematic theology in absentia.