Plagiarized by Harvard's President | Dr. Carol Swain | EP 467

Claud Gage defense has been, uh, it's racism. These are, they are racists that are going after her, and for them to acknowledge that I'm a black woman, you know, that has worked very hard in her career, you know, has been distinguished as a professor, they're not, they're not going there. I have the, uh, greatest, uh, claim against her because her dissertation where she got her PhD, that started her career, was framed around my work. They're not even willing to have a discussion with my [Music] attorneys.

Hello everybody, I'm speaking today with Dr. Carol Swain. Dr. Swain was a professor of political science and professor of law at Vanderbilt and also worked at Princeton. Now she came from a backwoods family, 12 kids, mother in some distress, dropped out of school when she was in grade 8, then got, went back to get her GED, then a 2-year community college degree, then a four-year degree. She stacked up five degrees and ended up with a very stellar academic career.

Um, she's published or edited 12 books, uh, including one that's been cited by the Supreme Court three times. Very solid person from an academic perspective. Why is she interesting? Well, she's interesting for all those reasons, but she's also interesting because she happens to be black, and, uh, she also happens to be the target of plagiarism by Claudine Gay at Harvard University.

Now, you may remember that Claudine Gay was the last president of Harvard University and was asked to step down, not least because of the revelation of her proclivity—pronounced proclivity—for plagiarism, and one of the major sources that Gay relied on was Carol Swain. So we're going to talk about that.

Join us! Well, Dr. Swain, thank you very much for agreeing to speak today to me and to everybody who's watching and listening. I guess we should probably start with a little bit of description about who you are and where you came from, and what you're doing.

Well, everything about me and the positions I take in the world, I know it's rooted in where I came from, and I was one of 12 children born and raised in rural poverty in Southwestern Virginia. I spent the early part of my life in a two-room shack with no indoor plumbing. I dropped out of school after completing the eighth grade, married at age 16, and then in my early 20s, I, uh, I earned a GED, which is a high school equivalency, went to a community college, got the first of five degrees.

I graduated in 1983 with a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude. I never intended to become a university professor. I struggled with shyness most of my life, and people came into my life; they steered me, and I became a professor. But it's not something that I ever saw happening for myself. Many of those people were white men, white professors, who encouraged me. They never treated me like a victim, but I grew up at a time in America where we were told if you worked hard and got an education, you could make something out of yourself.

So let's delve into that a bit more. So that's quite a twisty journey, that's for sure. You were married at 16, and you went back to college at 23, is that right? 23? Had you had children by then?

I think I probably was 23 when I went to, uh, the four-year college, but I had my first child at 17, and so in my early 20s, I had three children. One died of crib death—sudden infant death syndrome—and I struggled with depression, suicide gestures, and it was a medical doctor, uh, who turns out to have been Catholic. He was five years older than me. He was the first person to tell me that I was intelligent, I was attractive, I could do more with my life, and based on his encouragement, I earned my high school equivalency because I remembered that when I was in school that I did really well.

Later, there was an African orderly from Sierra Leone, a Muslim, who told me that he attended college with a lot of people who were not as smart as I was, and I ought to go to college. So those two people helped change my life.

But along the way, I came through, um, the educational system at a time after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed, and so there was, um, a recruitment of talented minorities, with an emphasis on talented minorities, and I benefited from an environment that I was intelligent, I worked hard, I caught people's attention.

When I earned my bachelor's degree at Rono College in Salem, Virginia, graduating magna cum laude, I was working full-time nights and weekends at the community college library. I don't have a lot of sympathy for this DEI and all this stuff about minorities can't do because I know what I did do, right?

Well, it certainly seems like you came from what you might say is almost an archetypally unlikely background, right? Poor, multi-child, no running water, no indoor plumbing, right? Um, married very early, very early children. Okay, so here's a question for you—you had these two guys you talked about, this physician and this Muslim gentleman who saw something in you and then encouraged you.

Okay, so the first question might be what do you think they saw in you, and how did they see it? And then the second question would be why did you believe what they told you when it was encouraging and complimentary? Right? So there's two mysteries: they saw something in you, but you also obviously decided to, what, take a big risk?

Now, you said you remembered that you had done well in school, so you had that going for you, right? You sort of had that in your back pocket. But it's easy to brush off encouragement, you know?

And I mean, you had every reason, as far as I can tell, to presume that, well, there's just no way you could do it, that was beyond you, it was too late, you already had children, that time had gone—like, there are a million rationalizations that you could have used instead of going to get your GED and then going to community college. So why did you do it?

Well, first of all, my mother would say that I was different from her other children, that I was always serious. But as a child, I had had a sense of urgency, and I also, um, felt like that I had been dropped from out of space, and I was watching my family like a participant observer. My mother said I would hide behind furniture because I was terribly shy, and I would peer out at people.

But I had a sense of urgency and was very serious, but then ended up, uh, you know, feeling trapped, getting married—not because I was pregnant—because I saw that as a way out. I had, um, during the time that I was a child, we missed a lot of school. One year, my siblings and I missed 80 of 180 school days, and that had to do with the weather being bad.

We didn't have proper clothes or shoes, and so we stayed home until the snow melted. We all failed, and I recently noticed, uh, as I was trying to work on a memoir, that I failed three times in elementary school. But my older sister and I could miss, uh, you know, two weeks of school, come in, and make an A or B on a test, and so I remembered that I was smart at one time, but I had forgotten until this medical doctor, uh, who happened to be white, who was five years older than me—and I didn't know that at the time—but we had reacquainted in the last five years; he remembered me and said he always wondered what happened to me.

He, he was not on social media and he obviously was not watching conservative news, right?

Okay, so you remembered that you had done well in school and your first step was to take the GED. And how long did it take you? You had to make up four years. You said you stopped in grade eight. You had to make up four years, and so how long did it take you to get your GED? And how did you manage to persist? And also, did you have support around you? Like, was your husband supportive? Was your family supportive? Did you have people who were also encouraging you apart from these two gentlemen?

Well, I can tell you that most people say if they didn't know it was a true story, that they wouldn't, they would not believe it. But with the GED, I studied a book at home, and I was told that I had one of the high SEC scores, uh, that they had seen. But in math, I barely passed. I was in the 34th percentile, and if I had been in the 32nd percentile, I would have failed the math portion.

And in graduate school, and during my time at the community college, math and statistics, that was a challenge, but I took remedial math at the community college. And as far as, um, people who encourage me, certainly when I reached the community college, there were plenty of encouragers. But I never sought, uh, to become a university professor. My first degree was in business; I wanted to be an artist.

I have art talent, uh, but I was told to be practical. And I can tell you one thing that made me different, I think, than a lot of young people—I sometimes run into people that are wired the way I was—is that if there was an authority figure that gave me advice, I was prone to follow the advice. And so if they told me that it was not practical to do art, I chose business.

And that was more challenging, but I ended up getting my two-year degree in business in two years, and then for the bachelor's degree, it was criminal justice because I loved those courses and political science for the master's and PhD. And then later, I went to law school for a one-year program at Yale.

I never again sought to become a university professor. My motivator was to be able to get a good job so I could support my family. I had been in bad marriages, and I saw an opportunity that if I got educated and I did try to distinguish myself, I made a decision to be an honor student at Rono College.

I studied, I purchased, and checked out books on how to make A's in college, how to do essay exams, and I also watched how other people dressed. And I had people comment that I was dressed inappropriately for a student. I was dressing like a professor as a student because I was watching other people trying to figure out what they were doing.

And so if I—my success has had a lot to do with I've had great mentors over the course of my life, and even now I have mentors. I don't think you get too old to have a mentor.

All right, so you finished your two-year degree in business, and then you were pursuing criminal justice and then political science and law. When did the idea—you know, when I decided to go to graduate school, this was at the University of Alberta. Our tracks parallel each other to some degree in terms of our age.

When I went to graduate school, when I started considering graduate school, I didn't know anyone who had ever gone to graduate school, and so it was quite a mystery to me, the whole situation. I started to associate a little bit with a psychology lab at my last year at the University of Alberta, I guess that would be in 1983, and that's when I formulated the ambition to pursue a graduate degree.

You, you finished your business degree and then your four-year bachelor's. How did you come across the idea of going off to do graduate work? And then maybe you could wind in the story about your mentors as well and describe exactly, you know, what role they played and why they were important. It's really important to have guidance.

You know, like when I went to graduate school, I had a superb advisor. Like, he was everything I could hope for. He was a really good administrator; he knew the literature extremely broadly; he was very, very encouraging. Like, we worked together like clockwork, and it was—I still work with him; it's 40 years later.

Like, we had a great relationship, super important. So how did you develop the idea that you should go to graduate school, and how did you get the confidence up to do that? Because he also said that you had to overcome shyness. What role did your mentors play in that?

Well, first, I have to tell you that I wanted to be a store manager at the mall. I applied for jobs after I earned my two-year degree, and I was told I needed a four-year degree, and I knew that I needed to distinguish myself. And so I chose criminal justice because it was filled with, uh, courses, interdisciplinary courses, that I thought I would do well in, and I did—and so that's how I chose criminal justice.

While I was, uh, getting my bachelor's degree, I started getting letters from colleges, universities, and my advisor, it turns out, he was a conservative. He exposed me to Glenn Lowry, Walter Williams, Milton Friedman, Edward Banfield's work, and I was, by the time I was graduating with the four-year degree, I knew I didn't want a criminal justice career.

I went to Virginia Tech thinking that I would work for the government, like a lot of other black people; I would get a job with the federal government. While I was there, my professors—and they were progressives—they really pushed me by saying that there was a critical need for black professors; if you can become a professor, you should become one.

I was not interested. This was the 1980s, and you may recall the 1980, uh, 384—we had a recession. I could not get a job, and that's why I applied to graduate school at the University of, uh, North Carolina Chapel Hill. Immediately, they admitted me; they gave me a generous, uh, stipend, which I believe was like $111,000, which was a lot of money back in the 1980s, and that's how I got to graduate school.

But at Virginia Tech, the mentoring was important. I started giving conference papers, and that—being exposed to academia—but actually pursuing a PhD and becoming a professor was something that I followed that path when I was not able to get a job.

Right, okay, okay, so now a couple of things to delve into there. So you said that when you were doing your two-year degree and then your four-year degree that you were also working full-time, and you said that you were learning how to be a student and reading about how to do that and watching other people and dressing up, essentially.

And so how much time per week do you suppose you were working, let's say in the third year of your four-year degree, if you totaled up the amount of classes you were taking, the studying you were doing, and the job that you had? How many hours a day do you think you were putting in that were, you know, actual work and for how long?

Well, for at least three years at Rono College, I worked nights and weekends, and it was in circulation in the library. And I confess, not many people used the library nights and weekends, so it was the perfect job for a student.

Oh, yes, okay. And so I went to school during the daytime; I was working in circulation during the evening, and I was able to get my schoolwork done, and so that's how I graduated magna cum laude. It's not that I was some genius, but I was very focused on—I needed to distinguish myself, and I'm not stupid. I knew that, um, as a black person that if I excelled, that I would be rewarded for that.

And sure enough, you know, my first semester, it’s like everyone knew my name at that small liberal arts college that was predominantly white because I had distinguished myself. And when I think about race, my race has advantaged me, um, I would say more than it's disadvantaged me, certainly once I reached college, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that I've always tried to distinguish myself.

I've had great mentors, and those mentors did not look like me. In fact, my advisor, uh, is and was a Republican; I didn't know that. But when I started college, I was met by the black students who were already there that gave me the list of racist professors. He was at the top of the list, and I'm the kind of person you throw that in the gauntlet; so they told me he was racist. I signed up for his class first because I wanted to, um, I knew that if I could impress him, that it would make a difference.

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Okay, so two questions still. Now, you know you said that you were very shy. And so, but when you were in college, you were at conferences giving academic papers. And so how did you manage your shyness and then also how did you become disciplined and able to work so diligently and to focus? You said a little bit of that was there when you were a kid; you were a serious kid, you had a sense of urgency, so likely have a temperamental tilt in that direction.

But, you know, you worked very hard to get your GED and your degrees, and so how did you learn to work, and how did you overcome your shyness?

Well, when I was an undergraduate, as you know, most professors will set aside 10% for class participation, and I wanted to earn that 10%, so I would write out a question or I'd write out a comment, and I would raise my hand shaking, and I would read my comment or ask my question. That's how I got the class participation.

And when it came to conferences or whenever I had to speak, I over-prepared. Like today, you know, I can do things off the cuff, but back then I tried to write out everything I was going to say, and I was not really, um, I would say delivered of that shyness until I was in my 40s, so most of my life I have been shy.

Also, I would like for you to know that it wasn't just the doctor and the orderly who told me, you know, that I was talented. At least three times in my life, I had complete strangers come up to me in my early 20s, late teens, and they said, "You're going to be famous someday. Do you know you're going to be famous?" And there was nothing I was doing at the time that made any sense.

Yeah, well, there's no shortage of strange things about life. So you said you were delivered of your shyness about when? You were in your 40s? So why did you persevere and how did you learn to speak off the cuff and how did it come about that you were delivered of your shyness?

Before I get to that, I want to tell you that I took psychology courses and usually made, um, an A. I had great fear in my early 20s that I was suffering from delusions of grandeur because I never fit where I was and I had no idea that I would go to college or I would become, you know, the person that I am today, and so that, um, is a part of what happened, part of my background.

But the other part of it is, you ask me how did I overcome the shyness? Yep, I had, uh, after I earned my tenure at Princeton—I earned early tenure on the basis of my book "Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African-Americans in Congress." It was my first book; it's the one that won three national prizes, was cited by the Supreme Court. It's the book that Claudine Gay plagiarized and used as a straw man for her own research.

After that, at the early tenure, the prizes, I was very disillusioned. Like, I had worked so hard, like nights, and I had worked without taking off breaks during the summers. I can remember, um, doing everything I had to do in the day, going back to work, and being there, working overnight when the cleaning crew came in, and I was so obsessed with getting early tenure, and I got my early tenure, but then I was disillusioned, and I really didn't fit at Princeton.

And I guess I would never fit in the Ivy League because once I was hired and I received a signing bonus and I was a hot shot, then when I looked around at the other people who were at the table, they spoke in these long paragraphs, and if they were going to ask a question—if they were going to take someone down—they had a particular way of speaking that was foreign to me.

Like, if I was going to ask a question, I tend to be very direct, I go straight. But I noticed the way they argued, and I, I was miserable. And that sort of set in motion a spiritual journey, and I can say that spiritually, I was always a seeker. I studied New Age, Eastern religion, and I had a Christian conversion experience; I became a divine Christian believer in 1999, but it was a journey before I had this, the culmination, and it was like I was delivered instantly from my shyness.

And I would argue that it's like I would say God impressed on my mind that he had given me a message bigger than me and that I should focus on the message. And when I thought about my shyness, I was always, uh, embarrassed by my Southern accent. I was embarrassed that people could tell that I came from poverty, and all of that kept me silent.

I was embarrassed that I make grammatical mistakes at times; all those things worked to keep me silent. But when I realized I only had to please God, it didn't matter what other people thought. I've been talking ever since without really caring what people think. I try to be careful; I try to speak truth. But at the end of the day, I'm not going to lose sleep if I make a mistake or if someone laughs at me.

That's their problem. Reminds me of the scene in Exodus, you know, when Moses becomes a lead. He goes off the beaten path and follows the call of the burning bush, and he focuses intently and follows his interest and delves further and further into the mystery that's caught his attention.

And eventually, God himself speaks to him and tells him that he has to become a leader. He has to lead his people away from slavery, and he has to stand up to the tyrant. And Moses says, "I can't do that because I'm not a good speaker." No one knows what his problem was precisely, but Moses certainly believed that he didn't have the talent or the ability to say what he was being called upon to say.

And God's response to that is twofold. The first part of the response is something like, well, that's your problem. Just because you have, um, inadequacies or idiosyncrasies, that doesn't alleviate you of your destiny or your moral responsibility, so no, no excuses. Thank you very much.

And then the second part of it is he tells him to ally with his brother Aaron, who can be his political voice, and the idea there is something like: well, you know, you might be called upon to do something, in all likelihood, and your conscience might impel you in that direction, but you don't necessarily have to do it alone.

Like you can find people around you who fill in, you know, your gaps. Now, you said that you had quite a lengthy process of seeking through the New Age realm, through comparative religion, let's say, and that you ended up with a Christian conversion in 1999.

Why do you think your seeking led you to Christianity per se? Do you have any idea about that?

Well, you know, I'm black; I'm a southerner, and most Southerners are Christians, and the people around me were either Baptists or Methodists. My family, they were Methodists, and when I watched them, the way they lived their lives, they did not have anything that was attractive to me.

And so, I mean, I explored with Jehovah's Witnesses; I was all over the place. I was always very spiritual. I always knew that there was something larger than me guiding my life, but I was not ready to say, you know, "this is Jesus Christ, you know, this is, uh, I believe one God, many paths," and I believed that for a long time.

But I knew that I was different; I knew that I was set aside, and I knew that, uh, things happened for me that didn't happen for other people. But I can say, um, I, in a way, I went back to my roots. My great grandfather had been a Methodist pastor; my grandmother was a pastor's daughter, but I walked away from all of that and then returned to it in my 40s.

But I always felt that Christianity that I experienced in my youth did not have any power, and I knew that there was a supernatural world, and I was always drawn to the New Age section of the bookstore. I was into Edgar Cayce, trying to do an autobi experience. I did a past life regression. I was all over the place, and, and, and I came full circle.

I believed in reincarnation for a long time but came full circle to believe what I believe today about Christianity and Jesus Christ being the only way. And I do believe that God called me; He set me aside. Among the 12 in my early 20s, I had a lot of guilt about my success because it didn't seem fair that out of the 12, my life was always better.

Even when I married at 16, my husband and I were building a brand new house and it was because of a government program. But my life has always been better than all of my siblings, and it took me a long time to get over the fact that, you know, that I was different and for some reason, I had a favor about me.

And when Princeton heard me, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't get early tenure. That was my goal; I accomplished it, but then it was just so empty, and that is what, you know, the journey part of it accelerated. But it culminated, uh, with me having a Christian conversion experience and becoming a devout believer.

So Carol, you said it didn't seem fair that out of the 12 children who were your siblings that you, um, advanced forward in the way that you had. And you talked also about not fitting and being different. I wanted to comment on that part first for the people who are watching and listening. You know, it's possible to be the sort of child and adolescent who has to grow up and find an intellectual community to fit in.

And so just because you don't fit in when you're eight or you don't fit in when you're 13—it doesn't mean there's no place in the world for you. It just means you have to find your place. And, you know, I knew kids in my little town where I grew up where, you know, they kind of their best years were when they were 16 and 17, and everything was downhill from then.

And that's pretty fun when you're 16 and 17, but it's not so much fun when you're 30 and 40, and so you had the reverse situation. It sounds like where, you know, you didn't find your place when you were a child or an adolescent, but it's pretty good to find your place as an adult because then you have your whole adult life for that.

So now you said it didn't seem fair. You also talked about your shyness, and you said that—and so it confused me a little bit because it wasn't obvious to me whether or not you were shy or whether or not you were ashamed.

Right? You said you were ashamed of your origin, you were ashamed of your poverty, you were ashamed of your accent and the possibility that you might make mistakes. And so that's different than temperamental shyness, you know? And I can see, therefore, why a religious revelation or conversion might help you with that because did it free you from your shame?

Is that a reasonable way of conceptualizing it?

I don't think I was ashamed of where I came from because I knew that, you know, I'm surrounded by people like Claudine Gay who have gone to the best schools in America, and there I was, uh, coming from nothing—a high school dropout—and I was surpassing them.

And so in some ways, I had confidence, but in other ways, I knew I did not fit. And I can tell you, even today, I have, I, I don't fit in institutions. I don't fit anywhere, and so I still feel like an outlier, and it's okay, and I would say that it took me until my 40s to accept myself and realize that it's okay to be me.

And so why do you feel that you, why do you think you still feel like an outlier? I mean, you've had a spectacularly successful academic career and also one that's associated with a high volume of publication, so that's obviously a marker of the validity of your high-impact academic career.

And so, I mean, you, you alluded to perhaps, you know, part of the reason why you don't fit in, so to speak, because you're, you're definitely not descending into academia from a multigenerational history of academics and educated people, so you're kind of a path breaker in that regard.

And obviously, your familial and educational background isn't standard for, you know, upper echelon, ivy league academic positions. Is there more to why you don't fit in? You're more conservative, you're Christian, you're creative, so that's also maybe, are all those things part of it?

Well, when I had my most success at Princeton, I was agnostic, and so, and I also believed in the academic enterprise, and so I did not—I was not faking it in any way. I believed in the standards and I wanted to be, you know, the best Congressional scholar I could be, and that was who I was.

But then at some point, I realized that that was, uh, empty for me, and I think that I've always been rejected. And some of that has to do with I'm very direct, I'm very blunt, and I'm very transparent, and that makes people feel uncomfortable.

And whether we're talking about in the political world, or the church world, or wherever I am, I think it's uncomfortable for people to deal with someone that isn't acting the way they should be acting because they know the norms.

And I can tell you one of the hardest things I had to learn, uh, and I learned it while I was at VT Law School is if you send someone an email or you contact them and they don't respond, that means no.

And I would just keep on trying to get an answer until one day a dean told me, uh, and he was being very kind to me, he said that if someone doesn't respond, that means no. If I always respond, and so there's so much that made me different, and I think people are uncomfortable because they don't know what I'll say. I don't know what I'll say.

Do you regard yourself as a conservative?

I regard myself as a truth speaker, and I feel like that at this stage in my life, I have to be positioned where I can speak truth and not worry about what anyone thinks. And I find that whether we're talking about conservatives or liberals, people are more comfortable around those they can control.

And when you reach, um, 70—I’m 70 now, I just don’t care. I care about the world; I care about, uh, the call on my life, and, and ending well. When I die, I would like people to say that I ended well, but the things that people use to control other people, it doesn't seem to work.

And as far as academia, I would say that every effort was made to destroy me, and yet, you know, it didn't work. And I think that it didn't work because it, it didn't work.

Well, let's talk about that. 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.

And so it's woefully inadequate. Now, Claudine Gay is also the person who, I would say, revealed the absolute decay of the Ivy League system at Congress last year with the president of UPen and the president of MIT and then was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal brought to light by publicized primarily by Christopher Rufo, who's working in Florida with Ron DeSantis.

Now you're tangled up in that business in a major way, and so you alluded to that earlier, and I also presume that this has at least 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, uh, walk through the Claudine Gay situation first. You were very generous to her, uh, as far as I'm concerned. Her dissertation, which was heavily plagiarized, and there she used my work to set up a straw man, uh, actually taking one of my conclusions to frame her research question.

There was direct, uh, verbatim plagiarism, but many, uh, ideas that were stolen. I question—and 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, uh, defend. And in my position, from my perspective, if that work, parts of it, is plagiarized, then there's a serious issue there.

She's only made a few corrections of her work, and the 11 articles that she published, three or four 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's 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.

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Wow, wow. Okay, so part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is because I was following the Claudine Gay story as it so painfully unfolded, and I learned about you, and then a mystery sort of emerged for me, and maybe you can help me.

It's, it's what would you 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 is 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.

And 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 credential, doctor.

And 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, and 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, uh, at what I presented. And when I was hired, I had a National Science—I had a National Science Foundation grant for my dissertation research. I had had a Harvard press contract on my, um, on a book, and I had offers of signing bonuses.

I had my own shortlist. Back in those days, I was hired in 1989, 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.

And so I was never, um, the poster child for the progressives because I did not fit that narrative. And 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.

And so look at Claudine Gay, and during the time that I was at, uh, Princeton, 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 at Stanford and, uh, and Princeton—and then, uh, the PhD from Harvard. She had the right pedigree.

They have always used affirmative action to pick the people that they wanted, and I think about, um, 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 blacks, and they have wanted those, in my mind, who had weaker credentials.

And so I was never rewarded. I never, um, uh, received a, an a, a cheer position while I was in academia, and the environment was just not conducive to my thriving. And I left academia in 2017. The immediate catalyst for that was 2016; I wrote an opinion piece criticizing Islam.

It created a firestorm; my circumstances changed, uh, the university distanced itself from me, and at some point, I realized I couldn't 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, and 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 Chris Rufo broke it. And 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, uh, set up a straw man using my work without doing it the way professors are taught, uh, to disagree. Like normally, if you want to take— you can take down anyone but 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, and those are things that she didn't do.

Oh, so, okay, so I didn't understand that you had only really come across this problem after the plagiarism scandal broke with Christopher Rufo. Okay, so that's part of the reason why it's received less attention than it might have.

Even see, I'm still res with this because you say, you know, you said a bunch of things that are very provocative in the last tranch of your statements. You know, you said you didn't fit the progressive narrative. Now it's a weird thing, you know, I kind of see this with Ayan Hirsi Ali as well.

You know, I read Ayan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel," oh, it must be 15 years ago, and I thought, "Oh my God, this woman, she's just unbelievable. She's so tough, she's so forthright, comes from this backwards African place, under, you know, fighting against extreme odds.

She makes it to the Netherlands, she makes something of herself; she's stunningly articulate, she's brave beyond belief." Like, you would presume that the feminists and the progressives would be hoisting her up on their shoulders as a triumphant example of what a woman can achieve, you know, based on the nobility of her character and the nobility of her intellect.

And yet she's regarded with enmity among the so-called progressives now, and you're telling a story that's very similar. And then you added something to it that's even stranger, you know, and really difficult to wrap your head around. So you said it's been your experience in academia that the white progressives in particular who didn't like you were very much inclined to pick the angry blacks, let's say, angry, resentful blacks with an axe to grind, with lesser academic credentials.

Okay, so now you got to think about, well, why the hell is that? Is that you could imagine an element of racism, which would be if you’re going to have black people around, you want to make sure that you have the great advantage of being able to look down on them, at least for some reason if they’re at least of the right class, then you don't have to put up with their annoying working-class idiosyncrasies.

And then, but that's so nefarious, you know? It's so nefarious, it's, it's a kind of racism that's, so it's much worse than the racism of low expectations, right? It's actually, what is it exactly?

It is just pure old-fashioned racism. I believe that the progressives in academia, they believe that racial and ethnic minorities are inferior. I'm sure you have heard or you're familiar with the fact that there are progressives who have labeled Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" as a fiction, a work of fiction.

And so the, the progressives, uh, they have to maintain this thing of all minorities being victims and black people and people of color not being able to do anything for themselves, and when they run across those of us who defy that narrative, there's no place for us.

And in my experiences, they have always rewarded those that fit the stereotype or who are willing to exploit it.

Okay, so I think you put your finger on the core issue here. So most of the pathology on the campuses and in the broader political sphere that I see now I attribute to the forceful imposition of a victim-victimizer narrative.

It's pretty straightforward, right? It's a post-modern derivative of Marxism, essentially, although the pedigree of such ideas goes way back before Marx into the French Revolution, way back before then into the biblical story of Cain and Abel, right?

The resentful Cain who always construes himself as a victim, who wants to pull down his ideal, who wants to shake his fist at God, it's a very old story.

Okay, so your hypothesis essentially is that because you didn't play the role of victim, didn't regard yourself as a victim, and did take advantage in the positive way of the benefits that this system offered you, including the mentorship of primarily conservative people, and that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps—although you said, you know, you had people who were encouraging you and helping you—that you're exactly the sort of person that indicates that the victim-victimizer narrative is wrong.

Now, do you put Clarence Thomas in the same category? You know, I met Justice Thomas; we had a very lovely time for about two hours. It was like meeting an old friend.

It was quite striking, and I think it was partly because there are elements of our background that were oddly similar. You know, like, my grandfather was a sharecropper in Saskatchewan—close enough, he lived in a log cabin.

And so, I'm one generation farther along than you with regards to, you know, the separation from poverty, but it's, it's not that far back in the past, right? I knew my grandfather quite well.

Um, he, he died about 15 years ago, but I knew him quite well, and talking to Clarence Thomas, I mean, I really enjoyed speaking with him. He was extremely warm, and he had done everything he could to put his life together stunningly successfully, and so I think it is the situation, like you and with Ian as well, is you're the worst sort of enemy for the progressives because you had the temerity to be a minority and be successful.

You know, and I see the same thing with this burgeoning anti-Semitism. The big problem with the Jews, so to speak, is that they're a minority with the temerity to be successful.

And so, yeah, yeah, so I see, so that's the rule, and that's the basis of this racism, that if we're going to uphold the victim-victimizer narrative, our worst enemies are minority people who've made a success of themselves.

And, you know something? I feel like that the people in academia, for someone like me, if they can destroy us, they do, and I'm still standing, and some of the attacks on me, most of the attacks have backfired in a way that it just gave me a greater platform.

But I think being a strong individualist, I've always been a strong individualist, and that's not something that's welcomed. When I think about my being, um, more conservative, I did not think of myself as a conservative when I was an undergrad. I wrote, um, my senior paper on affirmative action, and I was critical of it, and that was because I felt like it was hurting minorities, even back then.

And certainly today, I see how it has hurt minorities. And the worst thing is this diversity, equity, and inclusion because it's like affirmative action on steroids. And I strongly believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is what benefited me, millions of other people, you know, blacks, even some whites and women benefited from an environment that focused on non-discrimination, equal opportunity outreach.

I think about my success; I had an equal opportunity to succeed or fail. The outcome wasn't guaranteed. I chose, you know, to become an honor student. I worked hard for that. I knew that if I distinguished myself, it would make a difference, but they have just telling all minorities, no matter where you come from, that you can't because of racism.

And they are raising successes except for Asians, yes? Well, they are considered white, honorary white, right?

Right, worse than whites, maybe just like the Jews!

So, okay, so I'm going to tell you a story because I want to get to the heart of the matter with regards to DEI. So, I worked at Harvard for seven years, and I became friends with the dean of admissions there.

And I was very interested in predicting future success, so I did a whole research project at Harvard trying to identify personality and cognitive attributes that were predictive of success in managerial positions, working-class positions, creative positions, entrepreneurial positions, and so forth. It was a pure research enterprise, and that took me deep into the IQ and the personality literature before I knew anything about the political ramifications, okay?

So what I found out was this: I found out, first of all, that SATs, GREs, all the standardized tests that are used to gatekeep admission to high-level institutions of higher education were essentially tests of verbal IQ.

And now people deny that, but that's because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. Like, I know this literature inside out and backwards, and so they're IQ tests.

Now, I talked to Dean Whitlaw about admissions policies at Harvard, and he told me that without an affirmative action structure, there would be very few black people in the Ivy Leagues.

And so Dean, I wouldn't say, was either a liberal or a conservative, as far as I was concerned. I think what he was trying to do was to find the best people, the best undergraduates to come to Harvard. And so now, so that's a problem!

Now, another problem is, is that if you just use SATs and GREs and so forth, you're going to get a majority, uh, disproportionate number of Asians and Jews.

So that's also going to happen. And then there’s a third problem. So I talked to this guy named Adrian Woodward; he used to work for The Economist, a very smart man. He wrote a book on the history of merit, and he pointed out that if you don't use objective classifications of merit for your hiring and your promotion, the systems that don't rely on objective merit default to dynasty and nepotism.

So you don't get some sort of egalitarian equity if you scrap objective tests; what you get is who you know, who you're related to, who can pull strings and who can put your name forward.

Well, that's what's happening! So, but we're in a real conundrum, right? Because if we use purely objective tests, then we don't get an equal distribution of applicants from the ethnic and racial groups; we get a lot more Jews and we get...

Go ahead.

Well, I mean, I’ve given that a lot of thought, and I believe that racial and ethnic minorities can meet any standard put before them. But when they started lowering the standards so far with affirmative action, people learned uh what they had to do if you are black to get into Harvard or to get into the elite schools.

And I can tell you my success story would not have been a success story if I had not gone to that Community College, taken remedial math, gone to Rono College in Salem, Virginia, liberal arts school, uh, and then Virginia Tech.

I was never in an environment where I was struggling. And my personality is such that if I were at the bottom of the class, if I were failing a class, I would quit; I would have quit because I needed to do well.

And so they are harming racial and ethnic minorities that have high standards that really could have been successful at a state school or somewhere else when they bring them in to to make them feel good.

I believe that if you hold everyone to the same standard, you will have fewer racial and ethnic minorities, uh, maybe, but now, you know, people have had so many opportunities.

I don't know how many fewer. But once people learn what the standards are that they have to meet to go to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, wherever they want to go, I have confidence in racial and ethnic minorities being able to rise to meet that standard.

Even before affirmative action, during the era when there was blatant discrimination, the schools in New England, uh, and I would say Harvard too, if minorities were qualified, they admitted them.

So they had graduates, uh, but not in large numbers. And now we believe that there has to be a certain percentage. I don't think there has to be a certain percentage.

The difference between, uh, back when I came through and now is equity. They're seeking, uh, equal outcomes. They believe that you need people in certain percentages.

When I came through, it was equal opportunity; you had an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.

Well, the other problem with the bloody equity idea is that there's no limit to the number of ways you can categorize people.

And so the idea that we're going to get to some sort of utopia where every single person, regardless of how you categorize them intersectionally, all of those people are going to be, um, represented in every single profession in numbers equivalent to their proportion in the population, is such an absurd idea that you'd have to be educated at an Ivy League school for many years before you'd become daft enough to believe it, even on arithmetic principles alone.

It's so preposterous. And so the question is, exactly what's motivating?

And it's especially weird because it really strikes me—okay, so there's a worst thing about this too, as far as I'm concerned.

So, you know, I was bounced out of academia about the same time you were and under circumstances that were broadly similar, let's say. You were asking questions and for me, I think that I fell out of favor when Boren and Buck published "The Shape of The River," and I started talking about affirmative action.

I wrote an op-ed piece; I favored class-based, race-neutral affirmative action that was not what the elites wanted, and that was part of the beginning to the the beginning to the end for me.

Yeah, well, I stood up against a bill in Canada that mandated pronoun use. And so, but I was also no fan, for example, of affirmative action because I think it does I think it's clear that it does more harm than good.

I think it's clear now. So there's another way it does harm, and this is an ugly little thing too, but I believe it's true.

You know, as I as the DEI movement gained steam, I found myself looking with increasing suspicion on anyone who was black, let's say, or of, or gay, anybody who could have benefited from preferential treatment under the DEI rubric.

I started to become skeptical of it. It was like, maybe I’d be on a panel with someone, maybe we’d be on the same side or different sides, but that person, say on the opposite side, would be the member of a favored minority, and I’d think, “Just who the hell are you and how did you get your position?”

And this really makes me ill!

Well, and I saw this at Harvard too, you know, because the black kids there that I got to know, they had an additional burden to bear. Like all the kids who go to Harvard have impostor syndrome when they first get there.

If you don’t have impostor syndrome, there’s something wrong with you, right? But then the minority kids who've benefited from the DEI approach, they’ve got a lot bigger helping of impostor syndrome because it isn’t exactly obvious to them and also to the people around them exactly what they’re doing there.

And that’s perfectly fine for the scoundrels and scamps who are willing to twist the system to their benefit, who feel no shame for doing so.

But for people who’ve actually worked their tails to the bone, let’s say worked their hands to the bone in order to move ahead and to be credible, to have that shadow of doubt cast on them is, well, that’s Satan’s choice.

Like, there’s nothing worse than punishing people for their virtues. And you punish people who’ve got ahead on the basis of merit by using DEI standards.

I agree! And I think that, um, with the way the system is set up, it makes these students angry, and they set up these, uh, segregated spaces, these safe spaces, and they encourage—they’ve basically set up a system of segregation within colleges and universities.

Racial and ethnic minorities are angry, and I think they have a reason to be angry because they know they’re being used. And if you can’t do the work, of course, and you’re being told that white people are responsible, you’re the victim, and they’ve done all these things to you—all this campus unrest, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they have used diversity, the progressives, to bring in people who are not academically prepared to do the work.

And so they band together, and now they’ve lowered standards to the point that if you get your feet in the door at an IV institution, many of the state schools, they’re going to pass you along—you’ll get your degree, but you won’t know anything.

Well, the other thing that happens too, although the decrease in standards is starting to mitigate against this, is like if you would, I spent a lot of time studying the literature on managerial success. There’s quite an extensive business literature on managerial success, and one of the findings of the managerial literature is that many managers fail because they’re promoted to a position that they’re not actually competent to manage.

The Peter Principle, exactly! That’s, well, and the rule as a—as an employer is something like, and I’ve learned this the hard way with my enterprises, do not do someone a favor when you’re hiring them.

Because it’s not a favor if you take someone and you do and you aren’t thoroughly convinced that they’re competent for the job, all you’re doing is either setting them up for eventual failure or you’re downloading all their obligations to their minions who will have to work much harder under the thumb of an incompetent who’s likely to become a tyrant joylessly and without credit to pick up overflow. And there is nothing in that.

You also simultaneously demoralize the other managers who were hired on merit. It’s a catastrophe.

And so, and I see that happening in spades in academia, and so one of the consequences of that, at least early on, was that there might have been a disproportionate number of unqualified minority students being admitted, but the probability that they would actually graduate was very low.

So they tended to—yeah. Well, and then you can understand how that would even further heightened racial tension because if you’re brought into a school and everybody tells you that you belong there and then you fail, it’s very attractive, especially if you’re being shouted at by the progressives to do this constantly, to blame something like systemic racism for your failure.

Yeah, right? Well, you can understand why, you know, and, and we’re focused on higher education. Look what they’re doing at K-12 where they’re telling, uh, you know, minority children, they’re telling everyone that math is racist.

There’s almost no job that you can do that you don’t need math. Even an artist needs math, and so they’re taking, uh, minority students and rather than trying to equip the ones, you know, that have the ability to learn, they’re telling them that if you’re not, you know, doing well in math, it’s because it’s racist.

Yeah, yeah, well, again, that’s a, you know, that’s an extremely so psychologically, that’s extremely demoralizing. Like we know that people who have an external locus of control—that's the technical term—you may have encountered this in your psychology classes. If you believe that your life is governed by external forces, you allow yourself to believe that you’re much more likely to be ineffectual, depressed, anxious, and hopeless.

Okay, so that’s not a great outcome because you don’t succeed, plus you’re miserable. And you and you have no happiness. Those are separable things, right? And so whereas if you have an internal locus of control and you believe that you’re an active agent in the construction of your own destiny, then you obviously have to take on more responsibility.

But you have a lot more hope, and you’re much less likely to be depressed and anxious, and you’re more likely to be effectual and successful. And the victim-victimizer narrative is an external locus of control narrative.

It’s like you can’t succeed; the cards are stacked against you by evil malevolent people who perhaps were even around before you were born. There’s nothing you can do.

Well, you know, and then if you do fail, it’s because of these, you know, forces that are arrayed against you, and of course there is some corruption in the systems, and there has been racism and ethnic bias.

And so there’s some of that criticism that’s true, but as a comprehensive explanatory framework, it—it’s the victim-victimizer narrative that turns the world into enmity. Let me say this: I believe that what progressives are doing to minority communities, black and Hispanic, that is criminal.

And part of it is that they really do want to overthrow, you know, traditional institutions, and the crime and the dysfunctional behavior that you find in the black community, progressives excuse it. They encourage it, and so they’re really using people’s misery.

Uh, even with the LGBTQ+ community, they’re using people’s, uh, misery to advance a political goal. I don’t think they care anything about any of the groups that they claim to represent.

Yeah, yeah, well, okay. So let’s delve into that a little bit. So there’s a section of the literature on psychopathology that includes what are called cluster B personality disorders.

Okay, so if you—if you have a cluster B personality disorder, you’re—one of them is histrionic; that’s sort of a derivation of the old Freudian hyena.

You’re dramatic; everything around you is a drama, right? You’re a drama queen because it’s often a female pathology, by the way, histrionic personality disorder.

So you’re a drama queen; you play the victim. Um, you make mountains out of molehills continually. You take a simple situation and you complicate it, and you make sure that the attention is focused on you while you’re dealing like a martyr with your difficult life.

So that’s histrionic; that’s not much fun. Narcissistic, which means you want unearned social attention and status, and you’ll do anything to get it. Then there’s borderline personality disorder, which is probably the most serious of all the personality disorders, and it’s characterized by a pronounced tendency to victim-victimize and by radical emotional instability.

And so that’s not much fun. And then you have antisocial personality disorder in that category as well, and that’s more male, and it leads more to like overt criminality.

Okay, so now the reason I’m telling you that is because those are the people who are most likely to pathologize a victim-victimizer narrative. So if you’re dealing with someone who’s in that personality disorder cluster, there and thereafter, power and attention the way they camouflage that is by presenting themselves either as a victim or as an ally of victims.

So, right? So that’s fun. So the, like the most serious personality disordered types are the kind who will use their own misery, even if it’s self-induced, and the misery of others to camouflage their own power-seeking.

And I see a tremendous amount of that in the so-called progressive movement because they are, you put your finger on it, they’re using and probably abetting the misery of others, these ethnic minority groups they claim to be compassionate to. They’re using that as a justification for their own ideology and for their own power striving.

It's—and you know, that happens even within families is the real cluster B types. They'll mder—they’ll make victims out of their own children just so they can parade themselves as martyrs. It's really ugly; it’s really ugly.

Well, you know, to go to something positive, I feel like these people are strategically placed, but they are by no means the majority. And whether we're talking about Congress, that's dysfunctional, it's because the people who have common sense have no courage because they could stand up to the extremists.

And I believe the extremists—the ones that are driving the agenda—they are a minority, but they have placed— in a way, everyone's afraid to challenge them.

Yeah, well, there’s no doubt they’re a minority. You know, there’s no doubt there’s a minority. But the thing is, you don’t want to underestimate the strategic brilliance of the approach because if I position myself as either a victim or an ally of victims—which is even more convenient because then I don’t have to go through the trouble of being a victim—but now I’ve got, now I’m making the case that everything compassionate and loving resides in me.

They believe it though!

So I know they do. Well, but then, but then the upshot of that is, so I’m one of these people now, compassionate to a fault. Now, if you oppose me, I can easily just say, well, you’re against compassion. What sort of person is against compassion?

It’s only the worst of the predators that could possibly be against compassion. You wouldn’t be one of the worst of the predators, would you?

And so that’s the accusations that come out right away, you know, and if those are made out against people who have some conscience— and so the typical conservative, for example, tends to be high in conscientiousness.

If you make allegations like that, especially as a mob against someone conscientious, the conscientious person is likely to think, oh my God, all these people are upset with me. You know, I probably did something wrong and maybe I am a little more sexist than I should be—maybe I am a little more racist.

You know, the psychopaths and the cluster B types, they have no shame, so if you accuse them of something, they don’t care. But if you accuse a conservative or someone of decent moral standing, you’re going to put them back on their heels, and that’s also part of the reason that people are afraid to speak.

Well, that’s why the conservatives appear at times to be losing, and I can tell you with my interactions with Harvard University through my lawyers, you know, they don’t care. Claudine Gay has one of the best lawyers in the country, and, uh, there's been no apologies, and the insult to injury—the plagiarist, the plagiarism— is that they have never acknowledged that Carol Swain exists.

Well, we’re going to do something about that. I think, I think your story is—you see there’s another problem with your story, A, this is always the case with situations like this—and this is really where we find ourselves.

So look, here’s the option that confronts people who come across your story sort of casually, okay? They can assume that, you know, you came up from poverty and you worked your way through the university system with Merit and on the basis of Merit, and you became a professor, and you did your work and it was plagiarized, and it was plagiarized by none other than the president of the world’s foremost university, which indicates a depth of rot in that institution that’s so deep that it’s almost incomprehensible.

That’s also characteristic of many other institutions. So that’s what you’re asking them to believe. Or they can take the easy route out and say, oh, well, you know, Dr. Swain, um, she’s doing this for personal reason; she’s after status—like writing you off is a way easier.

Here how they would write me off—they would write me off as a, uh, right-wing extremist, uh, because—because, uh, Claudine Gay’s defense has been, uh, it’s racism. These are—they are racists that are, are going after her, and for them to acknowledge that I’m a black woman, you know, that has worked very hard in her career, you know, has been distinguished as a professor, they’re not— they’re not going there.

So they’re just totally ignoring the fact that I exist, and as far as I’m concerned, of all the people that Claudine Gay plagiarized, I have the greatest claim against her. Because her dissertation, where she got her PhD, that started her career, was framed around my work.

Her early articles—and then if you look at her, she's been fraudulent all of her life, and there's no evidence of a conscience. And certainly, Harvard University, the corporation, has no conscience. They're not even willing to have a discussion with my attorneys.

Okay, so let—I want to push back against all that because, well, it’s necessary to straighten all this out.

So are there people in the academic community who have a reputation that you believe to be credible who presume that your claims of plagiarism are accurate and justified?

Okay, okay. So can you talk about some of them?

Might Yale, but I don’t know if they’d appreciate me, uh, giving out their names.

I think—

Okay, that’s fine!

It’s fear that has kept some people from going against Harvard. And for me, I’m retired from academia; I’m doing other things now. And so if I were still in academia, I probably would pursue it, but most people who still have a career in academia would be afraid to get involved.

And when I think about Harvard, and one of the things I wanted to talk about with you is I think that it’s necessary to hold them accountable in multiple ways.

There are other professors other than Claudine Gay who have plagiarized, and some of this is because of DEI. I would be very interested in someone trying to identify a class of people who have been harmed by Harvard and the plagiarism of their work, and so I think that needs to be pursued.

And I—well, the undergraduates have been harmed by it. Yes! You know, if they have professors who aren’t bloody well qualified, who are also crooked, who are plagiarizing and who are teaching research ethics, then they’ve been harmed because there’s—I can’t imagine virtually anything more fraudulent than that.

Well, someone needs to start a class action. You know, set up the website, try to identify the class of people, and you need, you know, brilliant lawyers who can identify what the class should look like, and that’s something that needs to be done.

I myself have attorneys. We had a—we had a complaint for copyright infringement. It was supposed to be filed on June 24th. One of my friends, who’s a distinguished professor at, uh, at a university, looked at it, and he said, “There’s considerable risk to you. You can be sued personally if Harvard makes a motion to dismiss under copyright law.”

Copyright law is set up in such a way that the judge can order you to pay the court cost of the winning side, and so I could find myself paying for Harvard’s lawyers and the court—uh, and I was told that with copyright infringement and plagiarism in academia, it has not been pushed.

There’s really, uh, no penalty, no criminal or even civil penalties straightforward for plagiarism.

And so when Harvard was approached with the demand letter, they responded that, um, that ideas, uh, you know, can’t be—you can’t use copyright infringement ideas law to protect ideas. They said that her plagiarism of my work was de minimis, meaning it wasn’t that serious, and that it was fair use.

I don’t know that the lawyers know who I am or they actually read her dissertation, read my work, but they said that if we pursued it, I would be, um, we would be engaged in a frivolous lawsuit and that I would be responsible for their legal fees.

That gave me pause. I still may file the copyright infringement complaint because I think I have a strong case, but financially, I can’t afford to pay for Harvard’s lawyers. There’s considerable risk to me.

And I’m paying for my own lawyers. And so that’s one thing, that there’s an individual action that I, I would like to pursue. I’m willing to help someone else set up a class action that I would help advertise, but I’m not sure that I should be part of the class.

But there needs to be a class action against Harvard. And then I had thought about taking my complaint and the letters from Harvard and publishing a book and just not filing the complaint but exposing them.

And I’m sort of at a crossroads. I’m not sure what to do, but I cannot allow Harvard off the hook. They tried to define plagiarism as duplicative language, and they have not done anything— duplicative language—and have not done anything about the plagiarism they have on their faculty because some of them are DEI.

Or, and I—and since they are progressives and they believe minorities are inferior intellectually, they probably believe that the ends justify the means—that if they deal with that DEI, uh, harse that they will not have enough black people to satisfy whatever goal they’re trying to accomplish.

Yeah, so you are in a tough situation because, A, you have Harvard with its infinite pool of money arrayed against you, so that’s—that’s a problem. And second, sharp legal minds on her side.

But also, you know, you pointed to the fact that there isn’t a lot of legal precedent for what you’re doing. I mean, the rules for everybody watching and listening, you have to understand, that in a functioning academic community—and Harvard was certainly like this certainly through the 1990s, and I would say through most of the 2000s—if you plagiarized as a faculty member, even accidentally, you were in really serious trouble.

Like that was a big problem that was—that is the prime no-no among academic researchers; it’s certainly up there in the top two or three, so—but now you’re in a situation—you see this is very problematic because if the university has defaulted on its obligation to pursue plagiarism rigorously, and now that's also what they’re broadcasting to all their students by the way, they’re completely devaluing the notion of original contribution, which is the bread and butter of academic inquiry, and so they’ve defaulted on their responsibility.

Now you