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Greetings:<br><br>
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.<br><br>
To the Editor:<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/Plagiarism.htm" eudora="autourl"><font color="#0000FF"><u>www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/Plagiarism.htm</a></font>.
</u>Plagiarism is theft of intellectual property and is the academic
equivalent of violating the 8<font size=1><sup>th</sup></font>
Commandment.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<u>Nick Gier, Moscow<br><br>
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