Plagiarism

People's reactions to King's moral laxity show a racist double standard. When white ministers are discovered to have seduced women or frequented prostitutes, they are denounced and removed from the ministry. In the case of King, those who reveal his many sexual liaisons are denounced. Now it has been discovered that King obtained his doctoral degree by committing plagiarism. A white scholar who commits such a thing is scorned by his colleagues. Not so in the case of King. Such a shocking violation of the standards of intellectual honesty is explained away as a youthful indiscretion.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) has been cleared of the college plagiarism charge that helped to lead to his departure from the 1988 presidential race, the Wilmington News Journal reported Sunday. At Biden's request, the Delaware Supreme Court reviewed the allegation in 1987. The court's Board of Professional Responsibility exonerated the senator Dec. 21, 1987, said L. Susan Faw, independent disciplinary counsel for the panel, which prosecutes allegations of unethical behavior against attorneys.

A graduate student's discovery of plagiarisms while reading 20-year-old medical journals has led to the resignation of one of the nation's top psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School, officials of the university said Monday. Dr. Shervert Frazier, who once headed the National Institute of Mental Health, resigned last week as a Harvard professor and as director of McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution affiliated with the university.

The last thing a band that's been accused of plagiarism wants to do is hear its song on the radio along with the one it allegedly copied . . . unless that band is the Offspring. The Orange County group took to the air on KROQ-FM recently and played not one but two songs it's been accused of copping for its hit song "Come Out and Play," from the 4-million-selling album "Smash."

Trinity Law School Dean Winston L. Frost missed a deadline Monday to answer allegations that he plagiarized an article on the history of human rights for the school's law review journal. Frost asked for a two-week extension to issue a written response to charges that he lifted his article, which appeared in the fall 2000 issue of the Trinity Law Review, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., trying to control mounting damage to his drive for the Democratic presidential nomination, admitted Thursday that he had committed plagiarism during his first year of law school but called the controversy surrounding his borrowed passages in recent speeches "much ado about nothing."

A trial is scheduled in Los Angeles federal court in November in a lawsuit alleging that the author of a book about a murder-for-insurance scheme plagiarized material from a Vanity Fair article about the high-profile case in which Dr. Richard Boggs, a Glendale doctor, was sentenced to life in prison.

Historian Stephen E. Ambrose has been accused of plagiarizing sections of "The Wild Blue," his recent book about World War II bomber pilots. Fred Barnes, a columnist for The Weekly Standard, argues in the Jan. 14 issue of the magazine that Ambrose borrowed passages from "The Wings of Morning," a book by historian Thomas Childers about the same topic.

The way he tells it, Stephen Kessler was raised in the heart of Tornado Alley--a stretch of Missouri where "every spring, super cell clouds explode across brilliant blue skies" and children huddle under school desks when tornado warning sirens wail. "I have lived through floods, seen windstorms rip massive oaks from the earth and the devastation caused by tornadoes firsthand," Kessler recalled in a court affidavit. "Here nature can be sudden death. Inexplicable. Cruel.