King's dissertation
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!
There will follow a detailed annotation of King's thesis, with the plagiarized
portions highlighted and linked to their sources. So far, I've completed the
first part of chapter 3.
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6