[Vision2020] Plagiarism charges

[Melynda Huskey]

When I first heard of the plagiarism allegations against Doug Wilson, I 
decided to check for myself--I've had, alas, some professional experience in 
identifying plagiarists, and I wanted to see what was going on.

I found 23 examples of plagiarism in an 8-page section of the 33 pages of 
text.  In each case, the exact words from Fogel and Engerman's *Time on the 
Cross* were reproduced without quotation marks.  Sometimes there was a 
footnote at the end of a copied sentence or paragraph; other times there was 
not--but even when there was, nowhere in the text did the authors 
acknowledge that they were using someone else's exact words.  The length of 
quotation ranged from one sentence to 2 full paragraphs.

I can't imagine anyone with an advanced degree in the liberal arts not 
knowing what plagiarism is, or that this constituted a flagrant example of 
it.  It's not merely one or even two mishandled footnotes, or an accidental 
omission of a set of quotation marks--anyone can make that kind of mistake.  
But this is nearly a quarter of the text of the pamphlet, for Heaven's sake, 
copied verbatim, without attribution, from someone else's writing.

I have had students dismissed from university for plagiarism less extensive 
than what I found in "Southern Slavery as It Was."

Melynda Huskey