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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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