Dr. Carol Swain
speaker
48 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dr. Carol Swain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Carol, welcome back to the show. Great to see you. It is great to see you, too. And I understand you were at the Super Bowl. Yes. I was rooting for your Eagles.
Yes. And before I was at Vanderbilt, I was tenured at Princeton, early tenure. And my prize winning first book, Black Faces, Black Interests, the Representation of African-Americans in Congress, was the book that was plagiarized. And I found out, along with the rest of the world, on December 10th,
2023, when Dr. Art Laffer gave me a phone call and asked if I had heard that the president of Harvard University had been accused of plagiarizing her dissertation. And then he said, guess who she plagiarized? You. And so he referred me to Christopher Ruffo's a X page Twitter. And I went there, I saw the article and then I started getting phone calls and I read the work. First, I was shocked.
It happened 26 years earlier. Then I was deeply sad because she's a Black woman, I'm a Black woman, and I didn't think it was a good look for Black women. And then that sort of morphed into anger, which is not something that I usually engage in. When Harvard came out and said that it wasn't plagiarism, it was duplicative language without attribution. Right. And how did you feel about that?
I was angry. And that anger, again, it's not good to be angry. And I gave, I believe, 80 some interviews between December 10th and the middle of January. But I calmed myself down for Christmas. This happened December 10th. I'm angry, angry, angry, but I want to have a good Christmas.
I'm a Christian, calmed myself down, started posting scriptures on X, which I still do, because it was consuming me in a way that was not healthy. But January 2nd, Claudine Gay resigned. She has a letter, I believe, in the New York Times, and she blames racism. And when she blamed racism, then I'm angry all over again. And I called an attorney who had offered to take the case pro bono.
And I told him to pursue it. And so it was an attorney from Austin. And then later I moved from him to a paid legal team. And doing all of this, Claudine Gay never reached out to me. I had heard of her while I was at Princeton. I was a hot shot when I was hired and I got early tenure, got it in three years. First book, three national prizes. It's been cited by the US Supreme Court. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
What an interesting thing about all these degrees that she has. We know that colleges and universities are not equal. We also know that they have lowered the standards so much, especially at even the Ivy League, that once you get your foot in the door, they pass you along. It's almost impossible to fail. And so a person having a lot of degrees, that tells me nothing about their knowledge base,
or their work ethic. And I think the work ethic is key. And just having a degree and showing up, that doesn't mean anything. Do you show up? How hard do you work? Those women that were featured, they seem to be doing pretty well.
Well, I can tell you, Megan, I identify more with you just because we are two women that had to reinvent ourselves because we ran up against the forces that be. And we did so successfully. Most of the liberals don't have to worry about that.
Certainly my pleasure.
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.
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.
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