In her new book The Gay Affair, Dr. Carol Swain exposes the plagiarism scandal involving Harvard’s former president Claudine Gay, and critiques the failures plaguing elite academia. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.
Following now infamous congressional testimony on pervasive antisemitism at Harvard, the university's then president, Claudine Gay, was accused of widespread plagiarism, which ultimately caused her to step down.
One of the sources she allegedly drew from was the scholarship of Dr. Carol Swain, who has since written a book documenting the research that was stolen from her and the sequence of events.
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Swain to discuss her case and what she says are the systemic failures plaguing elite academia. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, February 1st, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
Joining us now to discuss the alleged plagiarism of her work by Harvard's former president and the academic integrity crisis is Dr. Carol Swain. Dr. Swain, thank you for joining us.
Certainly my pleasure.
Now, in your new book, The Gay Affair, you recount your own experience as a victim of alleged plagiarism by Claudine Gay, Harvard's first black president. First, how did this experience shape your perspective on the systemic failures you critique in the book?
I can tell you that discovering that I had been victimized 26 years ago was a shocker. And then the process, what I watched unfold over the next few months was very eye-opening. Because in the past, when people were caught plagiarizing, If they were journalists, they paid a price. And institutions used to monitor that.
But I learned that in the case of Claudine Gay and Harvard, what they did was stand behind her and even try to redefine plagiarism as duplicative language without attribution.
Yeah. Can you walk us through that? We followed it very closely here. But for any listeners who didn't, how exactly did Harvard respond to those accusations that came to light?
Well, Claudine Gay was Harvard University's first black president and second woman president, and she served a tenure of six months. And the plagiarism issue, it's my understanding from the reporters who had investigated it, that rumors had been swirling around, you know, for years.
And before she gave disastrous testimony in the House about anti-Semitism, there were already people hot on the trail. But the story broke December 10th, 2023. This was after her testimony before Congress, along with two other presidents of Ivy League colleges. Well, when the story broke, Initially, when I found out about it, first, I was not quick to rush to judgment.
I thought it could have been an accident that when you're doing a lot of research, maybe you forget to put the quotation. People can make innocent mistakes that were not meant to be plagiarism. And so I read her work and I became deeply troubled. That was my first reaction, deeply troubled.
But when Harvard came out standing behind her, then it began to turn to anger, especially when they tried to redefine Pleasureism, because I knew that with Harvard being a world-class university. They would call themselves the world-class university. If Harvard redefines plagiarism, it has a downstream effect on every other institution, including K through 12 education.
And so I started giving interviews. I believe I gave 83 interviews between December 10th and the end of January, all sorts of media. And then when she resigned on January 2nd and this book, The Gay Affair, Harvard Pleasureism, and the Death of Academic Integrity was timed to be released January 2nd, which is the anniversary of when she resigned.
She resigned and she blamed racism, and that was a bridge too far for me.
Yeah, indeed. Now, why do institutions like Harvard, in your opinion, struggle to hold faculty and administrators to the same ethical standards as they hold their students?
Well, I mean, that's a serious problem because we know at Harvard and most institutions, students have been suspended and they have been failed for courses and they have paid a price. The faculty have tenure and I think institutions decide that they don't want to deal with tenured faculty. But in the case of Claudine Gay, her dissertation is where I found plagiarism of my first book.
Black Faces, Black Interests, the Representation of African Americans in Congress. And, you know, when I got my Ph.D., you had to have original research that had to be defended before a committee. It had to be pathbreaking. And for her to be able to get a Ph.D. from Harvard, win a prize for that Ph.D., and have a rapid rise in academia...
to become the president of Harvard University, it just speaks volumes about diversity, equity and inclusion. I believe the fact that her committee did not hold her to high standards. And in the book, I talk about first hearing of Claudine Gay and the word brilliant. usually preceded discussions of her, this brilliant black student at Harvard University.
I was on the faculty of Princeton at the time, and I was tenured, but all I could hear about was this brilliant black student at Harvard. I did not know Claudine Gay personally, but I believe the fact that she was labeled as brilliant caused those progressive, and I'm going to say white, progressive white professors not to look very closely at her work. Mm-hmm.
So you say the racial factor absolutely played a defining role in terms of how she was treated differently in this.
From day one, some people would say, well, you know, it sounds like you're jealous. Well, I observed this thing. I know how hard I had to work to get my degree and to get my promotions. And this thing with Claudine Gay, she went to Phillips Exeter for her high school, and her undergraduate education includes Princeton and Stanford. Her bachelor's degree is from Stanford.
And then she went to get her Ph.D. from Harvard. She has 11 articles, I believe, and that was the basis of her being given tenure at Stanford and then also Harvard, becoming a full professor at Harvard, a named, chaired full professor. That would not have gotten her tenure at a Tier 1 school when I earned my tenure at Princeton. You had to have path-breaking work.
Yeah, for those not familiar with the kinds of standards that usually would be required for this level of an appointment, what would you normally expect in terms of productivity?
It was not the quantity as much as the quality. And you had to have path-breaking, pioneering work to earn tenure. And they expected a book. Black Faces, Black Interests was my tenure book. And so normally, that was the standard at Harvard, at Princeton, at Columbia, all of these places. For the social sciences, you had to have a path-breaking book. Claudine Gay never had a path-breaking book.
And according to some of the researchers, There have been allegations that three quarters of her work was plagiarized. And in the case of my work, and I talk about it in the book, the book is not just about Claudine and Harvard. It's also about plagiarism more broadly in journalism and academia.
and the fact that copyright law doesn't really protect intellectual property for situations like what I encountered, because I tried to pursue the legal route, and it became very clear that copyright law was not going to work for me, and it could work against me, because under copyright law, it's lose or pays. And for someone without deep pockets, you go up against Harvard University,
university they have a 50 billion dollar endowment 50 plus billion dollar endowment it's an uneven impossible battle even to have a court case against them would cost an individual between a hundred thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand and i was not deterred by that initially but in the book i talk about a discussion i had with a law professor at vanderbilt the former colleague
And he pointed out to me the risk in a way that I could really grasp what I was about to walk into. And then I realized that I could lose because I couldn't control which judge would actually get my case. I've seen enough lawfare against conservatives to know that even with the judge, there was a risk.
Lose a pace, and I was not about to use my retirement money and my Social Security to pay Harvard's lawyers.
Yeah, so really there's a sense that they can do this with impunity because of this imbalance, as you say, financially. Like you noted, your book broadens out. It's not just about Claudine Gay, obviously. It's about a larger systemic problem. You use the phrase, the death of academic integrity writ large. Can you expand on that?
We see that universities are no longer respected institutions. In fact, I've seen some surveys where a majority of parents and students say that a college education is not a good investment. And I think it has to do with the fact that we see just so much chaos and dysfunction coming from academia. I would say some of the worst ideas that have impacted our society came out of academia.
We occasionally get lists of National Science Foundation or National Endowment of the Humanities studies that were funded of ludicrous ideas that were funded using taxpayer dollars. And in the case of plagiarism, you know, most people who are educated and you don't have to have a college degree. I believe they start teaching about plagiarism in middle school.
And certainly by the time you're in high school, you know about citing sources and what's permissible and what isn't. And so that's always been the standard. You don't steal other people's intellectual property. But when it started disadvantaging elite institutions, they have started redefining the rules. And there have been plenty of white plagiarists.
You know, we can name Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, Kevin Cruz. And these are some people that were caught. In fact, I dedicate my book to these people for drawing attention to the problem of plagiarism.
But DEI seems to have worsened it in the sense that many of the people that Christopher Ruffo and Aaron Burnett identified happened to be racial and ethnic minorities and universities just turned a blind eye to it.
Yeah, you described plagiarism as a disease in higher education. Now we have the rise of generative AI that can just write papers for you. Where do you see this going in the coming years?
I think with AI that it writes in a particular kind of style and it may take more work on the part of the professor, but I believe that you can craft assignments or identify which papers are written by AI. And it's going to be more difficult.
I think what we need to do is somehow bring back a sense of integrity, moral ethics to the whole enterprise of academia, because right now it's in a sad state. And for people whose kids, you know, get into the Ivy League, they want to brag about it. Those are not bragging points anymore.
Your child is better off probably going to a state university where they adhere to traditional approaches to education than they are at an Ivy League school where they think they are morally superior to everyone else and they turn a blind eye to violations of traditional norms.
Beyond the specifics of the case that involves you and some of these other high-profile plagiarism cases, you also highlight broader implications for academia worldwide. What do you see as the most urgent steps institutions must take to safeguard academic integrity?
Well, I'd like to speak to Harvard alumni and people who care about the Ivy League, because whether we like it or not, and I hope this changes, most of our Supreme Court justices and newspaper editors, people in powerful positions are educated at Ivy League institutions. I would like to see Ivy League institutions make a commitment to high standards.
And one of the things that they all need to do, and not just the Ivy League, I would recommend every college or university that's been in existence for more than 100 years read the founding documents, the mission statements, the visions of the people who decided that they wanted to create that particular institution, because they have lost all sense of where they came from, any sense of purpose.
They are adrift, and they're part of the problem. Instead of lifting up nations, they're helping destroy nations. And I know what I'm saying is strong, but I do believe this. And I would like to see Harvard University make a commitment to high standards, Make a commitment to Veritas, its motto. Go back to seeking truth.
Final question. I fear I know the answer to this already. Have you gotten any apologies at all from anyone involved?
No, and I can tell you that as far as I'm concerned with Harvard, they added insult to injury because they totally ignored me. And Claudia and Gay did go back and make some corrections of other people's work that was plagiarized. In the book, I mentioned that there were 47 instances of plagiarism that were identified by researchers. And she only corrected a handful of those.
Nothing regarding my work was corrected, but I've said in the book that if she had picked up the phone and called me and apologized, that I would have accepted her apology. And I see Claudine Gay as a victim of a system that pushes racial and ethnic minorities really hard, far beyond where some of them should go. But the issue of plagiarism is not confined to racial and ethnic minorities.
It's something that elites do. Joe Biden did it. Teddy Kennedy. I mean, we can go down the list of people that cheat. It's all about cheating. And we need to live in a society where that's frowned upon rather than excused away.
Well, let's hope we can get there. Dr. Swain, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you. That was Dr. Carol Swain talking about her new book, The Gay Affair, Harvard Plagiarism and the Death of Academic Integrity. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.