[Vision2020] Plagiarism As It Is

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

Below you will find a letter that I have sent to local editors.  I will be 
responding to Wilson's response on this Blogg later this morning.

To the Editor:

Bill Warren should not make judgments about books he has not read. In his 
Daily News column (July 24-25), he states that Doug Wilson was not "wrong 
in his interpretation of the empirical social conditions that existed" in 
Southern Slavery.

In their booklet "Southern Slavery As It Was," Wilson and his co-author 
Steve Wilkins relied primarily on one source: R. W. Fogel's and S. L. 
Engerman's book "Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro 
Slavery," which has been widely criticized by historians of the South. Some 
assign it to their classes as an exercise in how not to do history.

We now know that Wilson and Wilkins not only relied heavily on this 
inaccurate book, but they also copied long passages from it. These passages 
are highlighted on facing pages and can be viewed at 
www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/Plagiarism.htm. Plagiarism is theft of 
intellectual property and is the academic equivalent of violating the 8th 
Commandment.

Wilson's plagiarism is worse than the student incidences that I have 
experienced, because Wilson has made a profit on each copy of "Slavery As 
It Was" that he has sold from his own Canon Press. That means that Little & 
Brown, Fogel and Engerman's publishers, could file charges against him.

There will be a full page ad in this newspaper with a selection of the 
plagiarized passages. I am collecting signatures of academics on the 
Palouse who are willing to condemn this worst of all intellectual crimes. 
The texts and the petition will be available at BookPeople in Moscow at a 
display entitled "Plagiarism As It Is." The petition can also be found at 
users.moscow.com/ngier/home/plagiarism.htm.

Wilson is a former student of mine and I am sorely disappointed in the way 
in which he has misused his academic training at the University of Idaho.

Nick Gier, Moscow



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