Esteemed former Vanderbilt professor, renowned scholar, and all-star panelist Dr. Carol Swain joined The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Tuesday to discuss the growing scandal involving Harvard’s Claudine Gay and increasingly difficult-to-defend allegations of plagiarism by the Ivy League school’s president.
Swain contends that Gay failed to credit her for sections of the book Black Faces, Black Interests, accusing her of derivative work since her dissertation, which Swain claims builds upon her own groundbreaking research.
Highlighting the potential harm caused by the lack of proper citation, Swain asserts that academia’s credibility is at stake, noting that Harvard has not responded to her evidence and speculates on the university’s future actions.
TRANSCRIPT
Michael Patrick Leahy: 12:20 p.m.; welcome back to The Tennessee Star Report.
We are delighted to welcome to our newsmaker line a very good friend, all-star panelist, former Vanderbilt professor, and world-class scholar, Carol Swain.
Good afternoon, Carol.
Carol Swain: Good afternoon to you.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Well, thank you for making the time to come chat with us. You’ve been very popular these days.
You have a really, a fire-breathing op-ed at The Wall Street Journal, published on the 17th, Claudine Gay and My Scholarship, and you say she failed to credit you for sections of your book, Black Faces, Black Interests.
Tell us a little bit about that, Carol.
Carol Swain: I mean, there’s more to it, which I explain in the next paragraph. There are two sections, one from Black Faces, Black Interests, and the other one from an article I published in 1997. But the larger beef with her is that starting with her dissertation, her work is derivative of my work.
And I’ve begun to read her dissertation, and I see places where she should have acknowledged my work, that she was building on my work, where she was getting her ideas from, why she was even doing that, addressing that topic, and she didn’t do so.
And I believe that by not properly and adequately citing and acknowledging my work, I was cheated out of citations, and in academia, your stature depends on how many citations you get.
If someone is doing work in a field where another person has done seminal work and my book, Black Faces, Black Interest, the representation of African Americans in Congress was considered pathbreaking. It won three national prizes, including the highest prize a political scientist can win in the profession.
And it was cited in many lower court decisions as well as three times by the U. S. Supreme Court in voting rights cases. It was a book that should have been engaged since her dissertation and a lot of her early work was on black congressional representation.
Michael Patrick Leahy: So you’ve been harmed by her plagiarism?
Carol Swain: I believe I have, and I just pulled out my dissertation in 1989, the title, “The Politics of Black Representation in 2006. Congressional Districts,” and then I published. In 1993, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress, which was updated in ’95, and reprinted in 2006. So, I was the person who developed ideas and concepts that other people, you know, tested and expanded. That’s how research is supposed to take place.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Have you heard from Harvard University, have they responded to your obviously clearly laid out evidence that Claudine Gay plagiarized you and it’s harmed your career? Have they said anything to you about it?
Carol Swain: Well, you know something? No, I have not heard from Harvard, and I plan to take a few days off starting on the 22nd. And not think about – well, I can’t control how, what I think about – but I plan to wait until the first of the year and see how I feel.
And people have asked me, are you going to sue her? I’ve not made any decisions, but if I were the lawyers at Harvard University, I would be reaching out to me around now.
Michael Patrick Leahy: But they’ve not reached out to you, have they?
Carol Swain: No, and probably – given what they did to other people who raised the issue – they sent their lawyers to threaten people.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Yeah, that’s what they did when The New York Post started reporting on this. They sent their lawyers in on it, right?
Carol Swain: Yeah, but I don’t care about their lawyers. I care about justice and fairness, and I’m not fighting for myself. I’m fighting for American education because if Harvard gets away with redefining what is plagiarism and keeping Dr. Claudine– Ms. Claudine Gay, as their president, I think that it will harm not only higher education, but also education in K-12.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Your voice has been heard all around conservative media on this. Has any of the mainstream media paid attention to your very valid arguments here?
Carol Swain: Well, NBC News contacted me. I was supposed to be on last Wednesday. And probably an hour before the interview. They said that the student from the Harvard Crimson, who was supposed to represent Dr. Gay’s – or Harvard’s – position, he changed his mind. And that they couldn’t have me on unless they found someone that wanted to go on to articulate a particular position, I guess – the position that Harvard has. And they said, ‘Well, maybe we’ll have you on tomorrow or Friday.’ I never heard from NBC again.
Apparently, there’s no one out there that wants to go on NBC to talk with me. And I was on NewsNation, the Cuomo show that sort of descended into a shouting match between me and Marc Lamont Hill. I did a lot of the shouting because I was not going to let him get away with anything.
I’ve debated him once. He doesn’t play fair. So, I decided in advance that I was going to make my point.
And I did.
Michael Patrick Leahy: You did. I watched that, by the way. I said, let’s watch how Carol handles this – and you just destroyed him. I mean, I’m just saying, you wiped the floor with him.
Carol Swain: And, he’s worse than I thought he was. I mean, he’s an example.
When I talk about these blacks – because his family, his parents were professionals, too. I think his dad was a professor. There are so many black professors at institutions with mediocre records but they had the right pedigree. And someone like me, I joke that I’m a mutt. I don’t come from the right background.
And I think that a lot of the institutions – they don’t want people who are creative, that have ideas, that push the boundaries intellectually.
Michael Patrick Leahy: I think you’re probably right.
Look, this is you’ve been highly visible on this Carol. I think this has raised your profile significantly. Where do you see this going for you, this whole argument?
Carol Swain: I don’t know, but I can’t give it up. It’s like, sometimes I’m like a dog with a bone, and right now, I can’t walk away from it, but it’s not about me, and it’s not about me wishing ill will for Claudine Gay. I feel sorry for her. A lot of my friends say, ‘How could you feel sorry for her?’
But she’s another human being, and it’s the Christmas season, and if I were Claudine Gay, I would be suffering, but if I were Claudine Gay, and we all make mistakes, I would resign because I would not want to hurt Harvard University, my alma mater, or the people who were supporting me.
So rather than make them stand up and stand behind something that is inexcusable, I would have stepped down. But people don’t think the way I do. And I have respect for that president of Penn who resigned.
She didn’t make someone fire her, she resigned. That was the right thing to do.
Michael Patrick Leahy: I think you’re more generous in your comments about Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard. I think she could care less about academic standards.
Carol Swain: That’s what other people say, and that she probably is not losing sleep over it.
I probably lost more sleep over it than she has.
And for me, it’s just a system that is so unjust. And it has always been so.
And it’s so elitist. So much classism.
And I think about Dr. Roland Fryer, the black economist who is brilliant at Harvard, how he pretty much destroyed his career. And they destroyed him because he was not getting the right answers.
His research was getting a lot of attention worldwide, but it was not supporting their narrative. And he’s still at Harvard, but under conditions where they have to approve his research. They have to sign off on it.
And they took away his lab. And taking away the lab impedes his ability to do research.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Carol, but you know you’ve got huge support for your position around the country. Right? You know that.
Around the world.
Yeah, around the world. And, you know, you’re in the right in this circumstance. My sense is that this issue is not going away. And I think Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, may think, well, she’s gotten away with something here.
I don’t think so. I think that this is going to just keep getting worse and worse and worse.
Last thought from you, Carol Swain, on this.
Carol Swain: I agree because some of the issues that I’ve raised in my interview, I saw an article, the Boston Globe raised the same issues, and there are more newspapers that are raising questions, and so I don’t see how Claudine Gay survives it, but if the Harvard Corporation turns around and appoints another DEI person that shares those beliefs; then, you know, it would just be like the House of Representatives, when we get rid of one bad speaker and then they replace it with another.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Carol Swain, thanks for joining us.
And look, have a Merry Christmas to our good friend Carol Swain.
Carol Swain: You too.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Thank you.
Carol Swain: Thank you.
Michael Patrick Leahy: We’ll have more when we get back. This is The Tennessee Star Report. I’m Michael Patrick Leahy.
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Photo “Carol Swain” by Carol Miller Swain.
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