Award-winning political scientist Carol Swain, whose work was allegedly plagiarized by former Harvard President Claudine Gay, says the university has a long way to go to restore its brand and that Ms. Gay’s resignation isn’t nearly enough.
“It would take new leadership that was more traditionally focused on academic standards and excellence,” Ms. Swain, a former tenured professor at both Princeton and Vanderbilt universities, told The Epoch Times. “And it would take Claudine Gay actually leaving, and the institution acknowledging that she had engaged in plagiarism, that she had violated academic standards.”
Though she is no longer president, Ms. Gay retains a $900,000 salary and a position on the faculty. Her resignation came on Jan. 2, after three months of controversy, beginning with Hamas’s surprise attack and massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, and subsequent questions about the university’s code of conduct when antisemitism became an issue during campus demonstrations in support of Hamas.
The controversy surrounding Ms. Gay ramped up after accusations that her published academic papers contained plagiarism.
One of the biggest victims of that plagiarism? Ms. Swain.
Ms. Swain, who, like Ms. Gay, is a black woman, battled her way up from classic underclass disadvantage to become recognized in her field. She earned tenure at two elite universities. Ms. Gay is the daughter of wealthy Haitian immigrants.
The two women represent opposite ends of the political spectrum, particularly in campus politics.
Ms. Gay, both in her writing and in her administrative work, has advanced the organizational framework of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which is now a mantra for universities, corporations, government agencies, and other large institutions.
Ms. Swain is a vocal opponent of DEI.
Her book “The Adversity of Diversity,” which she co-authored with Mike Towle, “puts forth a compelling case for questioning the entire diversity, equity, and inclusion industry that has departed from any integrationist goals,” lawyer and law professor Alan Dershowitz says in its foreword.
“It has become an aggressive force that takes organizations away from their core missions and often transforms them into divisive and disruptive institutions that openly violate the rights of members of disfavored groups,” Mr. Dershowitz wrote.
DEI and other ideas going along with it, which Ms. Swain termed “postmodern,” are deceptive in their language.
Such ideas were developed at universities, “and they somehow seeped down into the mainstream culture. And these ideas have been weaponized against us,” Ms. Swain told The Epoch Times.
Early Writings
Ms. Swain’s first academic book, “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress,” was published by the Harvard University Press in 1993 and won two scholarly prizes.The first, the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, was for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs. President Wilson’s name was dropped in 2021, and it was renamed the Merze Tate—Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award.
“The award is named after two inspiring women, Dr. Merze Tate and Dr. Elinor Ostrom, who were pioneers in the political science discipline and beyond. Dr. Tate was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in Government, while Dr. Ostrom was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on common pool resources. Both women contributed invaluable research and scholarship to the discipline of political science while facing prejudice relating to gender and race.”
The website provides no details on Ms. Tate’s professional achievements after obtaining her PhD, nor on the prejudice each supposedly faced.
They wrote that Ms. Gay, in her 1998 doctoral dissertation—which won a prize at Harvard—apparently plagiarized Ms. Swain’s book in two places. The article details the instances, quotes scholarly citation rules, and analyzes whether and how Ms. Gay might have violated them.
Equity is Not Equal Opportunity
“You would think that equity is the same as equal opportunity,” Ms. Swain told The Epoch Times. “That’s not true. You would think that inclusion is the same as integration. And that’s not true. [DEI advocates] have just taken words that people think they know what it means, and it means the opposite.”In so doing, they turned the concepts of the Civil Rights Act on their head, she said.
Ms. Swain, one of 12 children raised in a shack without running water in Virginia, said she was one of the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Act.
“Equal opportunity was an opportunity for you to get your foot in the door,” she said, “but you had to prove yourself once you got there, and that’s what a lot of us did.”
Ms. Gay enjoyed a more privileged upbringing. According to online sources, her family in Haiti owns the country’s largest concrete plant. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the most prestigious U.S. boarding schools, before attending Princeton, transferring to Stanford, and getting a doctorate from Harvard.
Ms. Gay gained tenure as an associate professor at Stanford, moved to Harvard in 2006, and was appointed to the African American Studies department in 2007. She moved up through two dean positions before being tapped as Harvard’s 30th president in December 2022, a job she began on July 1, 2023.
DEI has been a hallmark of her career.
“Both scandals discredited her presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities and rise through the institution.”
Mr. Rufo detailed her efforts to take down historical portraits of white males. She promoted the “denaming” of buildings if the faculty and administration decided the namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values.
“As president, Gay leads a sprawling DEI bureaucracy—officially, the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging—that seeks to influence how students speak, think, and behave in relation to race,” he wrote.
The university deleted most DEI materials from its website following Ms. Gay’s congressional testimony, Mr. Rufo wrote, but he said he was able to recover some of them through an Internet archive. He provided links to a number of them.
One archived item said: “Harvard’s DEI administrators encourage students to internalize the basic narrative of critical race theory. America is a nation defined by ’systemic racism,‘ ’police brutality,‘ ’white supremacist violence,‘ and ’the weaponization of whiteness.’
“In another resource, students were invited to ‘unpack’ their ‘white privilege’ and ’male privilege‘ and to consider their ’white fragility,‘ which stems from ’the privilege that accrues to white people living in a society that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.’ ”
Mr. Rufo described Ms. Gay as neither much of a scholar nor an outstanding administrator, having cost Harvard an estimated $1 billion or more in donations.
The Bud Light of Higher Education
Ms. Swain concurs with Mr. Rufo’s analysis.“‘Inclusion’ doesn’t mean ‘integration,’” she said. “Inclusion is about coming in with your group identity, holding on to the group identity, and almost threatening everyone else. If they say something to you, it’s because you’re a member of a marginalized group, and you should be accorded special treatment because of your lived experiences.”
According to Ms. Swain, questions about the sourcing of Ms. Gay’s doctoral thesis raise another question—whether she should even be accorded the courtesy title of “Doctor.”
She adds that Ms. Gay’s scholarship wasn’t good enough to warrant either her hiring to the faculty or her promotion once there.
Ivy League faculty hirings once required scholarly publishings of real significance, she said.
“Harvard may become the Bud Light of higher education,” said Ms. Swain, comparing present events to last year’s controversy where the top-selling beer in America saw its popularity plummet with an advertising campaign promoted by a transgender activist.
“Other institutions may see what Harvard did and really shore up their own academic integrity. I think Harvard has dug itself into a hole, just like Bud Light did with Dylan Mulvaney.”
