The following is a transcript of a recent interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and Dr. Carol Swain on a Saturday Extra edition of Morning Wire. Dr. Swain addresses the dual scandals facing Harvard and other Ivy League schools — a double standard for anti-Semitism and academic plagiarism.
JOHN: Joining us to discuss the Harvard presidential scandal is Dr. Carol Swain, Senior Fellow for the Institute for Faith and Culture. Dr. Swain, you were a tenured professor in the Ivy League – at Princeton – and you’ve been very outspoken on this situation, as your own work appears to have been plagiarized. First, what do you make of the Harvard board unanimously deciding to support Claudine Gay after her congressional testimony and now allegations of plagiarism?
CAROL: I see it as a low point for American higher education that Harvard University would try to redefine plagiarism so that it can retain its first ever black president – who was clearly promoted based on diversity, equity, and inclusion standards. And I would argue that her record, even if she had not plagiarized her articles, would not normally have supported tenure in the Ivy League. And I say this as someone who was tenured early at Princeton, and the standard in the Ivy League used to be that you had to have a major path-breaking publication. And the book that she lifted a couple of passages from, “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress,” was a book that won three national prizes, including the highest prize a political scientist can win. It was cited by many law court decisions, and the U. S. Supreme Court, and it was considered the seminal work in the area of minority representation and representation in Congress. And so that’s the book that she really lifted passages that were not that significant, but her entire research agenda was on minority representation on Congress. And even though she has one cite of me in her bibliography, normally, when you draw on the research of a leading scholar in a particular area, you have to engage that work. You have to let people know why you’re asking the questions that you are. She didn’t do that. She did not engage my work either to refute it, to affirm it, or to acknowledge it. And I would argue that that harmed me in my career – even though I wasn’t aware this was taking place – because in academia, your statute depends on how many times you are cited. If someone is in the area where you are the path breaker, and they are not engaging with your ideas, then it has long-term consequences. And so her work, in my opinion, is derivative of mine. I believe she got away with it because I was falling out of favor in academia, because I was becoming increasingly conservative.
JOHN: Now you are one of several professors whose work was improperly used in Gay’s writings, allegedly. University of Pittsburgh’s George Reid Andrews has acknowledged that Gay “did borrow a few of my phrases” – as did University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig. Both said they didn’t think it really rose to the level of plagiarism, but Anne Williamson, of Miami University, Ohio, said “It does look like plagiarism to me,” and said she was actually “shocked” by the passages Gay lifted from her work. Have you reviewed these passages under question?
CAROL: I’ve looked at the sections from my own work and the articles that have pulled out passages in other people’s work side by side, and I would argue that it is plagiarism, and that a journalist would lose their job over it. And it’s particularly troubling because it wasn’t just her dissertation – it also included the published works that she presented for tenure. And I would encourage people to look at that senior thesis she wrote at Stanford. It won a prize — her dissertation won a prize. Was the senior thesis plagiarized? That’s where they need to look next.
LISTEN: Morning Wire Saturday Extra — “Anti-Semitism & Plagiarism: Harvard’s Dual Crisis”
JOHN: The New York Post is now reporting that Harvard actually threatened them legally when a reporter reached out about these allegations back in October – which is surprising. Harvard has issued a statement addressing, briefly, the plagiarism charges. They said they did their own review and did find some instances that were problematic, and are now requesting four corrections in two articles. Is that an adequate response?
CAROL: It’s horrible. What they should do is, if they want to keep her on their faculty, certainly she should make those corrections, but normally you don’t get a do over in life. Most people are held accountable. We all make mistakes. She made a mistake, and I believe that if they want to keep her on the faculty of Harvard, okay, just give her mercy, allow her to make the corrections, but she should not be the president of Harvard University with that record of plagiarism — and the equity that we associate with Neo-Marxism and DEI is like affirmative action on steroids, and that is what has advanced her, and I believe what is keeping her in her position is that Harvard doesn’t want to embarrass itself by firing its first ever black president. So they would rather hurt their brand than to get rid of a woman that should be fired – and she should have been fired already.
JOHN: Some people say refusing to remove Gay was Harvard’s way of thumbing their nose at the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision against Harvard. What do you think about that?
CAROL: Absolutely, and I was born in 1954, the year of the Brown vs. Board school desegregation case, where the Supreme Court ordered integration of public education in all deliberate speed. And the response, in many places, was massive resistance. And they resisted up until the late 1960s in Bedford County, Virginia, where I went to school. And so I see the same thing happening, is that just like the elites resisted the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation case, the elites at these institutions have decided that they’re going to resist the Supreme Court’s decision to end race-based discrimination. And so I believe that we need to hold them accountable – that white people, Asian people, Christians, any group that’s being disfavored in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause, they need to document what is taking place, they need to file lawsuits, and we need to shut it down. It shouldn’t take 10 years or 20 years of them continuing to discriminate against people or finding proxies to continue doing what they’re doing.
JOHN: Now, one question about the other issue at hand here. the double standard for anti-Semitism on campus. Is there a double standard? If the protests and chants against Jews and Israel were taking place against blacks or even LGBT people, would Harvard and some of these other Ivy League schools have pointed to “context” as necessary to determine whether or not that was problematic?
CAROL: If the Jewish students were black, it wouldn’t just be Harvard and the Ivy league, but all of America, every institution – the Biden administration, every government would have shut it down immediately. The police would have shut it down if it had been black students being harassed and being threatened by white students. And that is the double standard. I, myself, I’m just shocked at how Jewish Americans are being treated in America today and the hatred towards Israel. And to me, if there’s a silver lining, it is that the Jewish people on the college campuses, some of them are awakening to the fact that the progressives are not their friends.
JOHN: You’ve been an advocate for viewpoint diversity in higher education – in fact you just published a book that addresses this issue directly – “The Adversity of Diversity: How the Supreme Court’s Decision to Remove Race from College Admissions Criteria Will Doom Diversity Programs.” What are your thoughts on how having more representation across the political spectrum could have helped Harvard avoid this controversy?
CAROL: I can tell you that I’m an advocate of education. I spent 28 years in academia. I took early retirement from Vanderbilt in 2017, pretty much in the heat of a controversy because of an opinion piece that I published criticizing Islam created a firestorm, and I left academia. But I saw the changes taking place, and it started right after President Obama was elected. I saw the Critical Race Theory that had been mostly confined to certain departments of the university that it started rapidly infecting every department. And I saw changes that made academia very uncomfortable for people like me. And I saw the decline of education to the point that they did not even give lip service to universities being marketplaces of ideas where you would have divergent voices allowed to speak. All of that started to die at American colleges and universities, and as a consequence, these institutions have allowed themselves to become indoctrination centers. And if we want to educate young people, if we want strong leaders, if we want people that are qualified to take positions of responsibility in society, we have to expose them to divergent ideas, or you can not develop critical thinking skills unless you are sort of made uncomfortable, unless you hear new ideas. That’s not taking place in the indoctrination centers we have today. And I also know that if you are conservative on a university campus, if you are deeply orthodox – whether it’s Christian, Jewish – it’s set up in such a way that if you don’t fit in, the universities are very uncomfortable places. And so there are students who live in fear. There’s no way you’re going to get a quality education if you’re so afraid you’re going to offend someone and you can’t ask questions. That’s not what higher education should be about. And so I believe that we have to make changes. And I also believe that changes are already happening. I’ve spoken this year at several universities, and I believe that universities are realizing that the value of the product that they’re producing has declined to the point that many young people are deciding that they don’t necessarily need or want a college education. And I have met parents who are very wealthy and grandparents who are telling me that the money they saved up for their offspring’s education, that they’re giving them an option: they can take the money and start a business, or they can go to college. And so, universities, higher education, these institutions are suffering because, right now, they’re not offering a quality product.
JOHN: There’s’ no doubt that the perception of universities has been shifting dramatically in recent years. Dr. Swain, thank you for coming on.
CAROL: Thank you.