National political reporter Neil W. McCabe and Dr. Carol M. Swain joined Thursday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss the latest developments surrounding Swain’s battle with Harvard University regarding its former president’s alleged plagiarism of her and other scholars’ work.
In December 2023, writer and activist Christopher Rufo accused then-Harvard University President Claudine Gay of plagiarizing “multiple sections” of Swain’s Ph.D. thesis from 1997.
Swain has since hired an attorney and reached out to Harvard, requesting answers to many questions surrounding the university’s plagiarism policy and its defense of Gay’s work.
Swain has yet to receive a response from the university.
During Thursday’s interview, Swain said she identified two direct instances of verbatim plagiarism and noted that Gay’s entire dissertation and early research based on her ideas.
“I can tell you that one of the ways she cheated me is that it wasn’t just the two instances of verbatim, it was that her whole dissertation and early research was based on my ideas, and by her not citing me properly, anyone that cited her work would not necessarily realize how seminal my work was and so she did ride on my coattails,” Swain said.
“But guess what? Everyone knew about my work in political science, and she was able to get away with that because my ideas were becoming increasingly conservative. It was challenging, you know, what the elites wanted out there. And so, to me, they’re just as guilty as she is because they allowed her to do what she did,” Swain added.
McCabe jumped in by noting the differences between Swain and Gay’s upbringings, saying Swain has an “understanding” of what “regular Americans go through” as opposed to Gay’s “immunity” to such understanding as she was “pampered her whole life.”
“I’ll just venture out and I’ll guess that because of your life story and the path that you took compared to say the path other people in academia and certainly Gay took, you had an appreciation of what the little people go through, what regular Americans go through, and that gave you a lens that, when Trump came up, I’m guessing that you recognized some of the things that he was talking about, as it’s just bizarre that he’s, you know, this blue collar billionaire, but he connects with people who are actually struggling with life. Whereas Gay is completely immune to this because she was pampered her whole life,” McCabe said.
Swain, noting the names of other black scholars who have made an impact in her field, agreed with McCabe, saying, “We come from the land of hard knocks.”
“The black elites, they’ve always stood in the way of other people and they have the pedigree. I would say that they don’t have the intellect and the creativity. The white elites want black people they can control, that will fit in at their parties better. And so for the most part, they reward those people and they are never the most qualified,” Swain added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Claudine Gay” by Harvard University.
