Inauguration of Claudine Gay by Office of Governor Healey, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr
CV NEWS FEED // Carol Swain, one of the scholars Harvard President Claudine Gay allegedly plagiarized, criticized the Ivy League university’s governing board for their recent decision to “unanimously” stand by Gay.
Swain is a political scientist who was a longtime professor at Vanderbilt University. “The Harvard Corporation did not have the cojones to own and remedy their mistakes regarding Dr. Gay,” she wrote.
“Despite the evidence of plagiarism throughout her career, she will remain at the helm of the University,” she continued in her Tuesday post on X (formerly Twitter). “There’s no accountability at Harvard.”
In an X post from the day before, Swain called for Gay’s resignation, along with that of Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
“RESIGN LADIES!” she wrote in all capital letters.
“It’s not about weathering storms,” the political scientist indicated. “It’s about doing the right thing for the institutions that trusted you with power.”
“Nothing is to be gained by hanging on,” she added. “Do us a favor and resign, please!”
Earlier that day, anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) advocate Christopher Rufo presented photographic evidence that he claimed proved Gay plagiarized Swain and other academics. Rufo referred to his report as a “bombshell” on X.
“Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain,” he wrote:
She copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book “Black Faces, Black Interests,” without providing a citation of any kind.
Gay’s use of Swain’s material is a straightforward violation of the university’s rules, which state that one “must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation”—neither of which Gay followed.
In recent weeks, Gay and other Ivy League presidents have come under fire for the language they used to discuss anti-Semitic incidents on campuses.
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, asked Gay at a House committee hearing.
“[I]f the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it,” Gay replied.
Swain is an African-American conservative. Formerly a Democrat, she eventually left the party to become a Republican. She has stated her support for former President Donald Trump on several occasions.
She retired from Vanderbilt in 2017 after nearly two decades at the institution. She later ran for Mayor of Nashville in 2019, placing third and narrowly missing the runoff election.
