The Disgrace and Plagiarism of Claudine Gay | Dr. Carol Swain

You alluded to the situation with Claudine Gay. Now, for everybody watching and listening, Claudine Gay was the president of Harvard University despite being woefully unqualified for that position.

In fact, I believe, after reviewing her academic record, that she's woefully unqualified to be a tenured professor at Harvard. Her publication record is thin, to say the least. With a record like that, she likely wouldn't have gotten an interview under normal circumstances at the University of Toronto for the psychology department for an entry-level position. So it's woefully inadequate.

Now, Claudine Gay is also the person who revealed, I would say, the absolute decay of the Ivy League system at Congress last year, with the president of UPenn and the president of MIT. Then she was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal brought to light, primarily publicized by Christopher Rufo, who's working in Florida with Ron DeSantis. Now you're tangled up in that business in a major way.

You alluded to that earlier, and I also presume that this has at least a tangential connection with these attempts that you just described to undermine you and destroy you. So could we walk through the Claudine Gay situation first, and then talk about the other more destructive elements of your experience in academia?

We can walk through the Claudine Gay situation first. You were very generous to her. As far as I'm concerned, her dissertation, which was heavily plagiarized, and there she used my work to set up a straw man.

Actually taking one of my conclusions to frame her research question, there was direct verbatim plagiarism, but many ideas that were stolen I questioned. I don't call her Dr. Gay; I call her Claudine Gay because to get a PhD, you're supposed to have original work that you defend. In my view, if that work, parts of it, are plagiarized, then she's only met a few corrections of her work, and the 11 articles that she produced—three-quarters of them were plagiarized.

I was not the only person plagiarized. I believe there may be 20 people all together; it's quite a few, and there are about 50 instances of plagiarism. She's earning $900,000 a year—her Harvard presidential salary. She was allowed to keep it, and to add insult to injury, there was a lot of insult to injury when it comes to me because she's never apologized, never reached out to me. She's teaching a course in the fall on reading and research ethics.

Wow, okay. So part of the reason I wanted to talk to you was because I was following the Claudine Gay story as it painfully unfolded and I learned about you, and then a mystery sort of emerged for me. Maybe you can help me. It's, it's what I would say is dangerous ground to tread on, but I'm going to try to weave my way through it nonetheless.

You would think, if you thought about this situation rationally, and maybe even with a certain degree of cynicism, that you would be a much better poster boy for the Democrat progressives than Claudine Gay because there's the racial issue, obviously, which unfortunately in this day and age can't be overlooked.

But Claudine Gay came from a privileged background from an economic perspective, and her family's very powerful, I believe, in Haiti, which is already something that stirs up all sorts of questions given the state of that country. And she was by no means oppressed, at least on economic grounds, and you came from, well, the archetypal rags-to-riches situation fundamentally.

You're making claims that Claudine Gay used your original work to build herself a pseudo-career and hasn't been called out on it. Okay, so I don't understand why this isn't a much bigger scandal than it is because I can't imagine anybody situated to be more credible than you to bring up these sorts of allegations, which you just duplicated and even extended, you know, describing your unwillingness even to describe her with her hypothetical academic credentials.

So you're obviously not very happy about this. So what ideas do you believe that she took from you? Why does it matter? What should happen with her? What has happened and what hasn't happened? Like, I know she still has her tenured faculty position at Harvard, and I can't understand that because if she was crooked enough to be taken out of her position as president for plagiarism, she is clearly—if that was the reason—she's clearly not suitable to be a professor at Harvard.

Because in my way of thinking about things, being a professor at Harvard is not a lesser position than being the president of Harvard. That's an administrative position, and it's a key administrative position. But a tenured professor at Harvard? That's a very hard thing to manage, and you don't get to have that if there are questions, for example, about whether or not you bloody well plagiarized all of your academic work. So, I don't understand.

Okay, so can you help me tell me what's going on? Well, I can tell you that progressives never supported me. Even when I was hired at Princeton, it was the conservative professors that were so delighted at what I presented.

When I was hired, I had a National Science Foundation grant for my dissertation research. I had a Harvard Press contract on my book, and I had offers of signing bonuses. I had my own shortlist back in those days; I was hired in 1989 and started in 1990. They held all professors to high standards, and to get tenured in the Ivy League, you had to have path-breaking work.

The work needs to be considered seminal, and I met those standards. But early on, the progressives did not like me. One of the professors who is at Harvard today—I could name her—she is a friend of Claudine Gay. But she sat me down the first week I was on campus and told me that I acted as if I didn't need Black people, that I couldn't trust white people, that white people would sell me down the river.

So I was never the poster child for the progressives because I did not fit that narrative. I was told many times that I did not need to share my background because I've always shared where I came from. That was always an embarrassment to the progressives. So look at Claudine Gay, and during the time that I was at Princeton—and sometimes I was on admission committees—I saw them pick Blacks that had weaker academic credentials but the right pedigree: Claudine Gay, Phillips Exeter Academy undergrad, Stanford, and Princeton, and then the PhD from Harvard. She had the right pedigree.

They have always used affirmative action to handpick the people that they wanted. I think about Claudine Gay and other minorities that I have encountered. For some reason, white progressives or the people who run universities have always favored the angry Black and have wanted those, in my mind, who had weaker credentials.

So I was never rewarded. I never received any coveted positions while I was in academia, and the environment was just not conducive to my thriving. I left academia in 2017. The immediate catalyst for that was in 2016, when I wrote an opinion piece criticizing Islam. That created a firestorm. My circumstances changed; the university distanced itself from me.

At some point, I realized I couldn't be my best self under those circumstances. I was not getting any younger, and so I took early retirement, and I had to reinvent myself. I walked away from the tenure that I worked so hard to earn. I can tell you that I'm very sad because I love students, and I assumed that I would be teaching until I retired at a normal age.

But I took the early retirement, and I knew nothing about Claudine Gay still in my research until December 10th when the Christopher Rufo story broke. I was willing to give her the benefit of a doubt because I thought maybe it was an accident. You know, I didn't realize until I started reading her work that her dissertation itself was framed around my work and some of her early articles.

She essentially set up a straw man using my work without doing it the way professors are taught to disagree. Normally, if you want to take someone down, you say who you're taking down, why they're wrong, you lay out a case for that, and you certainly include them in your literature review. Those are things that she didn't do.