August 22, 2025 • 47 mins
🚨 On January 2, 2024, Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University’s first Black president following explosive scandals — her evasive answers about antisemitism on campus and shocking revelations of plagiarism throughout her academic career. In this powerful episode of Corsi Nation, Dr. Jerome Corsi speaks with Dr. Carol Swain, one of the leading academics whose work Gay plagiarized. Together, they expose:
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- The prevalence of plagiarism across elite universities
- Why academic leadership has ignored these scandals for years
- How antisemitism and corruption are undermining higher education
- What this means for the future of America’s universities
• MyVitalC: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/myvitalc-ess60-in-organic-olive-oil/
• Swiss America: https://www.swissamerica.com/offer/CorsiRMP.php
📬 Join Dr. Jerome Corsi on Substack: https://jeromecorsiphd.substack.com/
📖 Get your FREE copy of Dr. Corsi's new book with Swiss America CEO Dean Heskin, How the Coming Global Crash Will Create a Historic Gold Rush, by calling 800-519-6268
🐦 Follow Dr. Jerome Corsi on X: @corsijerome1 🔔 Subscribe for fearless commentary you won’t hear from mainstream media.
👍 Like, share, and comment to join the conversation! #ClaudineGay #Harvard #Plagiarism #Antisemitism #CorsiNation #HigherEd
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
More angels of this doctor Drome Corsi, and we have
a special guest with us today. We've got doctor Carol Swain.
Doctor Swain, how are you today.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I am doing great, and thank you so much for
having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I'm really looking forward to this. You have a new
book out, and I think it's a really exciting and
important book. It's called The Gay Affair and it's Harvard
plagiarism and the death of academic integrity. Now, this is
really interesting because Clouding Gay was the president of Harvard,
(00:42):
which is I think probably one of the most prestigious
positions you can have in academics, and yet she was
found to be a plagiarist a doctoral dissertation and one
of the people that she plagiarized the most with doctor Swain.
(01:03):
And so this is really extremely interesting because I think
it demonstrates the corruption of this DEI diversity, equity and
inclusion agenda that has dominated our universities. And especially interviewing
doctor Swain this week, right after President Trump has been
(01:24):
re elected and now has been reinaugurated as president and
has impact. Yesterday by executive order ended all DEI programs
in the federal government, closed down the DEI departments throughout
the bureaucracy. It's really timely that we have doctor Swain
on to explain her book and what happened to her
(01:48):
and what she learned from all this, which is going
to be fascinating. So doctor Swain, welcome and congratulations on
the publication of your book.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I'd like to point out too that the release day
it was January second, twenty twenty five, which is the
anniversary of Claudine Gay's resignation from Harvard.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
That's interesting was that coincidental or were able to arrange
it was done deliberately? Deliberately? Okay, well to Shay, how
did you find out that Claudine Gay had plagiarized your work?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I received a phone call from doctor Art laffer on
December tenth, twenty twenty three, and it was a Sunday evening,
probably around eight. And I'm friends with Art Laugher, but
we're not friends like Jerome. I don't expect you to
call me Sunday evening. But when the phone rang, he
(02:50):
asked me if I had heard about the president of
Harvard University that she had been accused of pleasure ride
her dissertation, And he said, and guess who she pleasurized you.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
That must have been a shock to you to hear that.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It was a shock because it occurred twenty six years
ago and I was just finding out about it. And
then the phone started to ring. Doctor Laugher encouraged me
to go to Chris Rufo's X page, and I went
there and I saw that he had published an article
and that I was in the article. And at that
time there were two instances identified of pleasurism, and I
(03:35):
did not want to rush to judgment. I wanted to
read her work before I decided how serious it was,
because at that time I was willing to give her
the benefit of a doubt. I thought, well, maybe it
was accidental, maybe you know, she just left off quotation marks.
But I started reading her work and I became very,
very troubled. That was my first reaction, was being trouble.
(03:59):
But then when her very quickly came out and defended
her and said that she had not engaged in pleasurism
but duplicative language without attribution, then I became angry. And
that anger consumed me for several weeks until I was
able to work my way through it. And I did
(04:21):
work my way through it, I calmed down totally. And
then January second, when she released her statement and she resigned,
she blamed racism in part, and then that caused my
blood to boil. I'd already been contacted by an attorney
who said he wanted to take the case pro bono.
(04:43):
I contacted that attorney and I told him that he
could send his demand letter to Harvard.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Right and the work that she plagiarized, what was the
work of yours that was plagiarized.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
It's my first book, Blackfaces, Black Interests, The Representaation of
African Americans in Congress, published in nineteen ninety three, updated
in nineteen ninety five, and it came out of my
own dissertation research that was funded by the National Science
Foundation that involved me traveling around with white and black
members of Congress to answer the question how well does
(05:19):
the US Congress represent African American interests? And that book
won three national prizes, including the highest price the political
scientists can win that at the time, that was the
Woodrow Wilson Foundation Prize. It's the name has been changed
because Woodrow Wilson is no longer he's politically incorrect. And
(05:39):
it won the dB Hartman Award for Best Book on
Congress and shared the vok Award for Best Book on
Southern Politics. And so the book was a splash, and
its biggest contribution was that it identified a trade off
between a descriptive representation having more people in office who
look like you, and substantive representation having people who support
(06:04):
your agenda. And I argue that political party was more
important than the race of the representative. And I questioned
the drawing of majority black legislative districts. At the time,
I was a Democrat, and you know my research. I
went where my research took me. And I can tell you, Jerome,
that people would come up to me and say, you know,
(06:25):
this is such a wonderful book. It's just so amazing.
No one can guess your race by reading the book.
And I'm thinking, no one should be able to guess
my race by reading the book. I wanted to be
a congressional scholar, and I wanted to be the best
congressional scholar I could be, And so that ended up
being my tenure book. And it received three citations from
(06:50):
the US Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And it's interesting because your work establishes that what a
person believes is more important than their political party, if
I'm hearing you correctly. In other words, that explain what
the how the party and the person's belief interact those
two variables.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I the treade off was you could have more people
in office who looked like you and less representation, and
so having more black faces. The title of the book
black Faces, Black Interests the representation of African Americans in Congress.
And at that time there was a big debate about
(07:33):
drawing majority black legislative districts. The argument was that the
districts had to be sixty five percent black or greater.
I questioned that, and I also met the argument that
whites would support black candidates, and that sometimes your best
representative is not a member of your group, that whites
could represent blacks and blacks could represent whites. And so
(07:57):
I met the case for substantive presentation, people who can
actually get out there and support your agenda. And it
wasn't just role called votes. I looked at I traveled
to various districts based on the demographic characteristics of the district.
I came up with my own indicator of black interests,
(08:18):
and I chose districts I looked at white representatives of
majority black districts, black representatives of black districts, black representatives
of white districts, black and white representatives of mixed districts.
And the book for some people was controversial because it
it disagreed with those who argue that only blacks could
(08:41):
represent black interests. And so with Claudine Gay, there was
some verbatim theft of words and sentences, but the idea
her I would I argue in the book that her
research question was basically came out of my conclusion. She
was challenging my research without doing it the way scholars
(09:04):
are taught to do it. Like if you want to
challenge a scholar, if you do your literature review, you're
supposed to state their position and what's wrong with their position,
take them apart, not ignore them. And in her dissertation,
I believe she has one citation of my work, but
not in the setup. It's as if she came up
(09:25):
with this original idea on her own. And it wasn't
just the dissertation. Some of her other articles also drew
heavily on ideas in my work.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
But she was arguing essentially that caluding. Gay's argument was
that you had to have black representatives representing black policy
or black views or you know, issues, And she was
really opposed to your conclusions.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yes, yes, and she But what she did was used
my work as a strong man for.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Her without attribution to you, or without arguing that you
had both positive the other side of the argument. Yeah.
In other words, it was intellectually dishonest. In other words,
had she say, okay, doctor Swain has written this book
and here are her conclusions, and had represented fairly what
you had done, and then she on her own said
(10:23):
here's why I disagree. Here's my evidence at arguments as
to why I disagree. That would have been honest and legitimate. Correct.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, and you know what I think was going on.
I mean, my book made quite a splash at the
time because there was a debate going on. In fact,
it was resolved by the Supreme Court whether or not
it was constitutional to draw majority black legislative districts, and
at that time the court struck down districts that had
(10:52):
been drawn sixty five percent black or greater. And my book,
one of the reasons that it made such an impact
was that I argued that it was not the right
right strategy to draw the overwhelmingly black districts, that they
were not needed because whites would support blacks, and that
(11:15):
black representation was contingent on Democrats being able to organize
the Congress, and if the Democrats ever lost control of
the Congress, they would lose Black power. And that happened
the year after my book was published, and at that
time there was this hue and cry by the NAACP
(11:35):
and all kinds of progressive groups saying that black representation
in Congress was going to end. One person argued that
the number of blacks left in Congress would fit in
the back of a taxicab. I wrote a Congressional Quarterly
article that the blacks would be re elected because of
the incumbency advantage. And so, I mean, I just did
(11:56):
good political science, and I was right.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Well, and there's a fundamental point here, which is that
a lot of the civil rights legislation going back to
the Johnson administration has been predicated on the fact that,
you know, race is a critical determinant of what somebody
(12:19):
is going to believe or how they're going to behave.
So therefore racial preferences, in order to account for or
to redress past discrimination would be required, and that only
through that could black interests be fully representative in the
(12:45):
legislature and legislation and public policy. And what you're saying
is basically that you know that right whites can and
do support black people. Understand stood on the basis that
were all human beings races inconsequential.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Well, let me tell you that this book again was
published in nineteen ninety three, and as part of my research,
I looked at the districts very closely, the registration levels,
voter registration levels, and turnout, and at that time, forty
percent of the blacks in Congress were being elected from
districts there were not majority black on election day because
(13:28):
once you factored in the registration levels the turnout, they
were already being elected by whites. And so it was
controversial when I argued that whites would support black candidates
and when blacks lost, they lost because of their liberal
views and not because of their race. Because even then
it was clear to me that Democrats that had a
(13:50):
problem with race that they probably you know, they probably
had gone elsewhere that that was not going to be
a huge detriment to blacks getting elected in the nineteen nineties.
So that was pretty much my argument. I won the
national prizes, I got early tenure at Princeton, but I
also got labeled as a conservative. And in the book
(14:13):
I argue that there's no way that Podingue's dissertation committee
was not aware of my work, and it was. In
some ways it may have been like a counseling because
they needed a high profile black person to counter what
I was saying. And I think that council culture. We
labeled it a few years ago, but it's been going
(14:35):
on for a long time, and I don't think it's
uncommon for progressives to not cite the work of people
that they deemed as conservative. And at the time I
was a Democrat. I was not seeking to become a Republican.
I was just seeking to be a good political scientist.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Right, But your argument had political consequences, yes it did,
and that and so suddenly you found yourself being repudiated
by Claudine Gay, who is a rising star in the
Eastern University establishment and kind of deemed to be, you know,
(15:15):
the kind of person that could be promoted to be
president of Harvard based on her leftist in ideological orientation
and her attractiveness as a person and so therefore when
they refuted your where they refuted your arguments, they didn't
(15:37):
even give you the acknowledgment that you existed. They didn't
even want to. They just ignored you entirely while refuting you.
And it was kind of like a wink wink to
those who knew what was going on, that they knew
you were being refuted, but they didn't want anybody reading
your work on its own or evaluating it independently. They
(15:57):
didn't want you to be seen.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Well, I mean, that's true that there's been a not
wanting me to be seen. But Claudine Gay was a
student while I was at Princeton, and I heard of her.
And I talk about the fact that I heard of
this brilliant black woman at Harvard, and that's all I
could hear about this brilliant woman. And I did not
(16:20):
realize that she I didn't follow her work closely because
my work moved in another direction, and that is why.
And as I became more conservative, I saw of stop
going to the meetings, and I was totally unaware that
her work had tracked so closely my work, her early work,
and that these things had happened. I'd never read her dissertation,
(16:45):
and so it was twenty six years later that I
discovered what happened. And then, you know, then when I
read her work and saw all the places where she
should have cited me, and she didn't cite me. And
when I did my dissertation, you know, I guess I
had a book on how to write a dissertation. I
did a thorough literature review. And there is a scholar
(17:06):
who's deceased now named Hannah Pitkin. She wrote the seminal
path breaking book on representation, and so I cite Hannah.
She doesn't cite Hannah or me yet she's dealing with representation,
and so there were so many shortcuts in her research.
And I believe that it was because she had to
(17:26):
write pedigree. She was from Phillips, Exeter Academy, Undergrade Education, Princeton,
and Stanford PhD. Harvard, and she just was perfect for
the narrative. And I believe that she was pushed and
that the progressors did not care because I was not
(17:48):
important enough.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Well, and also they didn't want to acknowledge you. So
I few would go and actually seek you out and
read what you had written. Hae, you been acknowledged. It
would have drawn attention to your work, and serious scholars
would have said, wait a minute, this work demands some attention.
They didn't want to risk that, so that was you're
(18:11):
already canceled while you know, in the process of being
plagiarized and refuted.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Well, you know something, the journalist that I discussed in
the book who uncovered the pleasurism apparently the rumors had
been circulating for years and doctor, I mean, I'm not
called in gay. She cited some of the derivative work
of scholars, and she pledgiarized some of those people who
(18:38):
actually cited my work and built on my work and
handled it the way they were supposed to handle it.
She cited them, but not me.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Well, she was a pick rising star. She had the
right qualifications, starting with that she was woken, intellectually aligned
with the values that this hard left wanted to promote.
So she was picked for that. She fit their narrative.
(19:12):
She embodied their narrative. They can represent her as brilliant.
They didn't mind that she stole. She was politically on
the side of the argument they wanted to advance. And
the left has always utilized the divisions of race in
other words to say that you know, only blacks can
(19:32):
represent blacks, only blacks can understand blacks racially defining how
knowledge is organized, when the fact is knowledge is not
race dependent, right, And that's what your work revealed, is
that knowledge is what people believe and how people think
is not race dependent. And there are bigots on every
(19:57):
side of the race card that you want to play
in the airp people who are sympathetic and understand that
race is not a determining characteristic, which is you know,
if you go back to Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King,
you know, I was his whole position was, we want
equal opportunity. We don't want special privileges, we don't want
(20:20):
special concessions. We just want to eliminate the discrimination, the barriers,
and that we're allowed to compete on the equal plane.
We'll do just fine because talent and intellect and all
the other qualifications are not race distributed. And so therefore
that was his argument, whereas this hard left went exactly
(20:43):
the other way and saying, no, only only blacks can
understand blacks, only blacks can determine the agenda.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
And you know, my research quest and that sort of
prepared started my the idea for the dissertation came from
all these articles I was reading. This made the case
that black representation would soon end because there were only
two majority black districts represented by white people Lindy Boggs
(21:12):
in Louisiana Peter Ordino in New Jersey, and that as
soon as those districts were claimed, black representation would end.
And so my question was, is it really true that
only blacks can represent blacks? And I can tell you
that my career has been advanced by me just asking
(21:32):
simple questions like that and pursuing the evidence wherever it led.
And so I was not persuaded that they were right
that only blacks could represent black interests. And so that
was what was behind my research, which was funded by
the National Science Foundation. I got a grant for eleven
thousand dollars in the late nineteen eighties, which was a
(21:54):
lot of money for a student.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
In your book, again, let's highlight the book. The book
is The Gay Affair, and it's subtitled Harvard Plagiarism and
the Death of Academic Integrity. And we're going to get
into those issues in a minute. But it's available in
both a paperback form and it's an audio book.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
As well, Yes, and it's where of a book a soul,
but it's always easy for people to go to Amazon sometimes.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
And there's the Amazon listening. We're showing it on the
screen now for those watching the podcast, and I want
to continue. You also discuss in your book Kamala Harris
and that she was a plagiarist as well. You want
to get into that subject because that's pretty interesting given
that she just lost the presidential race rather significantly in
(22:48):
a landslide to Donald Trump and his re election effort,
and lost the popular vote, lost all the swing states,
and lost a substantial majority in the electoral college. So
it was really a solid win for Donald Trump over Kamala.
(23:08):
And I don't think it had to do with race
as much as it had to do with her radical
leftist orientation. He woke nature earn her. She was just
a terrible candidate with a a very undistinguished, indistinguished background.
And in that background you revealed it included plagiarism. Correct.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yes, And also in the book, I talk about pleasure
writis that there's a pandemic affecting higher education, and so
the book is not just about Claudine Gay, it discussed
other high profile pleasurists and the fact that there is
no accountability. And yes, Kamala Harris it was exposed during
(23:51):
the campaign as having lifted passages from other research for
her book on crime. And it seems to be that
there seems to be a trend of foot among the
left to redefine pleasurism. Harvard tried to do it when
they called Clodinay's actions duplicative language without attribution. And I
(24:15):
think it's very dangerous for higher education because it sends
the wrong signal to lesser institutions, and also through K
through twelve education, there are teachers out there trying to
drill in that student's proper ways to do research with integrity. Meanwhile,
you have our leaders cutting corners.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Well if you can, your book, the death of your subtitle,
the death of academic integrity is really I think at
the heart of what your book is about. Yes, because
what your argument is I readn't look at it is
that essentially the academic enterprise has become politicized and so therefore,
(25:01):
as long as your conclusions are sufficiently to the radical left,
neo Marxist or cultural Maoist or critical race theory or
critical gender theory. It doesn't matter that you follow the
rules of not being a plagiarist, of proper attribution of sources,
(25:23):
of direct quotations, being representative direct quotations. I mean fundamentally,
the radical left is legitimating intellectual theft.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
They are and they have the media because you're not
going to sell very many books if you cannot get
exposure for your ideas. So it's almost impossible if you're
a conservative unless you're well connected. You can get on Fox,
you know, on a regular basis, and Newsmax. For the
most part, the left will not give conservative scholars the
(25:59):
same attention. And with my book Blackfaces Black Interest, the
representation of African Americans in Congress, I was at Princeton,
but I was also a Democrat, and I was supported
by Democrats that were concerned about where our country was headed.
And so my book got lots of attention. But as
(26:22):
I became more conservative, it's been a lot harder to
get exposure for ideas that cut against the grain.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Right because they are not They do not want to
promote your views which are not a radicalization of race
such that it fits into the identity politics identity politics
is all about divisions, yes, and I mean I almost
(26:52):
think it becomes schizophrenic and that whatever your particular orientation is,
as long as your radical life, even if it's schizophrenic
in terms of your identification as a person or sexually
or any other way, that that's got to be celebrated
by everybody.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Well, I mean, things are changing, and I don't know
how we'll shake out in the end because we have
followed the wrong path for so long. And the other
thing that my book does is it talks about how
copyright law. That was how I legally wanted to pursue
a case against Harvard. It's not a good vehicle for
(27:36):
that because it protects copyright holders, but the theft of
ideas that's not protected. Institutions have to police their own members,
and so there was a time when journalistic organizations and
colleges and universities they would police and deal with breaches
(27:57):
of academic integrity. No more. They seem to be doing
a wink wink when it comes to pleasurism in their ranks.
And I think it's because they value the people who
engage in it as long as they're pushing the right ideas.
They don't want to punish those people.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Well, it try to mean, you know, you can see
it all over Joe Biden making, you know, essentially engaging
in bribery with Ukraine, with China, with Russia, Russia selling
political favors for personal gain. And here's Donald Trump, which
(28:36):
who suffered all these indictments over cases that were very,
very weak, all of which have been losing or dismissed
or ultimately will be reversed on an appeal. And yet
it's his because of his political orientation, which is America
first and traditional values, He's not going He's going to
(28:57):
try to destroy the wok agenda. Right, He's persecuted. And
those are the left, regardless of the egregious crimes they commit,
are excused. Yes, And I think your Claudia Gay case,
I mean you actually sued Harvard and how did that go?
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Well, I didn't file the complaint, and in the book
I talk about the factors that led me. At the
last minute, when the lawyers had the complaint drawn, I
decided not to file it. And it was after I
had a conversation with the law professor friend of mine
who really used an analogy that caught my attention. He
(29:38):
talked about Hamas attacking Israel and how as a consequence,
you know, Israel was able to wipe out much of Gaza.
His point was that don't pick a fight with someone
that can wipe you out. And he was afraid that
if I pursued it and lost, and he pointed out
(30:01):
to me in a way, my lawyers hadn't that undercopyright law,
loser pays, that I could end up having to pay
for Harvard's lawyers as well as my own. And I
had already been told that it would cost between one
hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars just to
go to trial. And so at the last minute, after
we had let us have gone back and forth, and
(30:24):
the complaint had been written ready to be filed, I
decided that I should follow a different path. And the
book is my different path. And in the appendices I
had the letters. I had the side by side of
Claudine Gay's work and my work and the complaint so
(30:45):
that people can actually see my case, that is my
case that I would have filed if I had gone
to court. I could never be sure what kind of
judge I would get. I would have filed in Tennessee
and in Nashville, and if I ended up with the
kinds of judges that Donald Trump had just being a
black Democrat, being a black Republican challenging Harvard, you know,
(31:10):
I'm not sure that I would have gotten a fair trial,
and so I did not want to risk it because
I have grandchildren, great grandchildren, I have, you know, I'm
at retirement age. There was too much risk for me
financially to go forward. And so the book The Gay Affair, Harvard, Pleasurerism,
(31:31):
and the Death of Academic Integrity is my way of
holding Harvard accountable. And I'm hoping that it will make
a difference, that people will read it and they will
understand that they are problems with copyright law when it
comes to academia, and that maybe changes need to be
made in copyright law itself. Pleasurism itself is not a misdemeanor,
(31:54):
it's not a felony. It has to be policed by institutions,
and institutions of higher education had to decide are they
going to be in the business of education or politics.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
And right now they're in the business of politics. And
that's pretty clear now. Claudine Gay resigned, and I'm convinced
it was your raising the issue of her plagiarism that
led to that resignation. But yet she turned out quite well,
didn't she. What's her current status at Harvard.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Well, she landed on her feet. She was able to
keep I don't know for how long her nine hundred
thousand dollars a year salary.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
That she had at nine hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
A year, almost a million dollar salary. And this past
fall she taught a course on research and writing for
African American studies. I would have loved to have been
a fly on the wall to see how she handled
that course on research and writing.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah, whether she discussed plagiarism at all, or whether she
at Eddie rules of what you should do with academic discourse.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
And this other thing with Harvard is that they have
just pretty much totally ignored me. She made some corrections
to her dissertation because there were forty seven identified instances
of duplicative language without attribution involving a number of people,
(33:27):
and she corrected a handful of those, but she never,
as far as I know, corrected anything that pertained to
my work. She never called me to apologize. And I
say in the book that if she had ever picked
up the phone and made a phone call and told
me she was sorry that she made a mistake knowing me,
that would have been the end of it. I would
(33:49):
not have written the book. But the whole idea that
they would just totally ignore me as insult to injury.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Right, and the whole corruption. And my PhD's from Harvard.
So I was at Harvard. I graduated, got my PhD
in nineteen seventy two. Now Harvard of twenty twenty five
is very different than Harvard of nineteen seventy two, but
it was already beginning. I mean, the leftist control of
(34:22):
the university was already pretty apparent that that was going
to be in the ascendancy. This was during the Vietnam War.
And I got to Harvard nineteen sixty eight, which just
in just in the months before the takeover of University
Hall by the students in a protest same time, when
(34:43):
Columbia University was being taken over by the students the
administrative building in Columbia University and universities around the country
in protests to the Vietnam War. Largely but again this
was on the heels of the civil rights movement. It
was on the whole issue which had been developing that
(35:08):
was moving far left of Martin Luther King, who was,
by the way, a Republican I know, and not a Democrat,
and the whole, the whole nature of the debate which
has become radicalized towards race and not followed the path
(35:34):
that Martin Luther King had wanted it to follow. Ironically,
I think has ended up with a society in which,
in general, there's much less racial discrimination that I see
in the society today as when I was a child
in the nineteen fifties. I was very aware of it.
In the nineteen fifties, I would fly into Washington National
(35:58):
I spent a lot of time in Washington and even
as a kid with my father, and it is in general,
and you'd see the lunch counters and the black women
and men would be serving the food, but the cashiers
would always be white, right. And I noticed that right
away when I was just a child, and said that
(36:20):
this just isn't right. I mean, it just had a
you know, the but that's gone to a large extent,
that's gone. And now the use of race has become
to the discrimination of whites. It's turned the other way.
The left has really turned it around to your illegitimate
(36:46):
unless you're a person of color.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
I agree, And in twenty twenty three, I published another book,
The Adversity of Diversity, The Adversity of Diversity and I.
The subtitle was about how the Supreme Court decision to
end race based college admissions would spell the end of
DEI and that was published August twenty twenty three and
(37:13):
pretty much totally ignored I got it right, And in
that book, pretty much I say that we got it
right in the nineteen sixties when we passed the nineteen
sixty four Civil Rights Act, and it was closer to
the equal protection clus of the Constitution, and that Americans
they don't have a problem. We want non discrimination, equal opportunity,
(37:37):
and outreach. Those are the values and goals that Americans endorsed.
But DEI became affirmative action on steroids. And when President
Trump signed the executive order ending the DEI in the
federal government among contractors, he also signed an executive order
(38:02):
ending affirmative action.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
So not just splaining, I think your book is really
about the death of the academic integrity, and it has,
it's making some very important statements about the nature of
racial relations in the United States, because I think we're
we're seeing now the end of DEI certainly with Donald
(38:27):
Trump and the Supreme Court moving towards saying that racial
preferences are inherently suspect, which means that kind of the
original Martin Luther King idea of racial equality equal opportunity
is being revisited and reinstated. I think that's really I
(38:50):
mean where we need to go. Martin Luther King used
to talk about how race was not that important, it's
not a defining characteristic in human beings. On that, you know,
there's blacks who have excelled in every area you can
think of endeavor on What is fundamental human condition is
(39:12):
the ability to raise children and return to God and
families and develop a culture that is based upon learning
and respect for God, not its values. And I think
you would agree with that.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
I would agree with it, And I would also point
out that, you know, it's been about sixty years since
the passage of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four,
and we are at a new place in America. There
are probably close to eight states that are either majority
minority or will be so soon, and so the old
(39:48):
ways of doing things have to change or have to change.
And I believe that President Trump's decisions with the executive
orders was absolutely the right thing that needed to happen.
He had the courage to do it. Now, going back
to Claudine Gay in the book, a couple of places
(40:09):
I point out that I see her as a victim
of DEI as someone that was pushed further than she
should have been pushed. The record that she presented for
tenure at Stanford would not have gotten her tenure at
Princeton when I earned my tenure. And there's been a
lourn of standards. In the purpose of the book, I
(40:31):
talk about born in Bach, they wrote a book in
nineteen ninety eight, The Shape of the River, and in
that book they talked about affirmative action and the need
for it, and that if you didn't have aggressive affirmative action,
that you would not have black leaders. And I believe
that Claudine Gay and some of the blacks that we've
(40:53):
seen since then, some of the younger ones, were pushed
through under a standard that was much lower than previous
generations of blacks who made it into academia.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Well, I think that merit is the fundamental issue and
all human endeavor. I think it's one again that the
left has opposed. It's given participations, awards and sports instead
of winners and losers. It's all kinds of things that
try to emphasize that these you know, should who you
(41:27):
are should determine the result, not whether you're you know,
your capability to perform the task. And we've seen the
results of that, and that companies that are led by
DEI are not producing the most effective products. And you know,
you can't have airplanes where the doors fall off or
(41:48):
the you know, the airplane seeses work in one way
or the other. It's got to be built correctly.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
But I would also say that the divisiveness that's come
out of the aggressive critical race theory and DEI has
been detrimental to our society. And there's a strong sense
of entitlement and there are many people that have been
taught to believe that someone has stolen from them that
(42:16):
had it not been, you know, for white oppression, that
they would be further along. And I believe that those
ideas have been detrimental. They've set blacks back in other groups,
and there has been a lowering of standards pushed by
white progressives. And when it comes to pleasurism, it's not
(42:37):
just something that Claudine Gay and black scholars have engaged in.
There are plenty of high profile white people that have also.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Engaged in it.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
And some of the ones that were charged or with
pleasurism Dorris Kerns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Kevin Cruz, and Malcolm Gladwell.
There are lots of people that are white. And what
I see is that progressives have just redefined pleasurism, especially
(43:11):
when it involves people that they value.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
It's the universities have got to be or academic integrity.
The churches have got to be not about liberation theology,
but about God and Jesus Christ or the true religious values.
You can't have businesses where people are promoted onto the
(43:37):
boards and advanced into senior management based on race. They
have to be able to do the job. They have
to have the qualifications that ESG is not going to
produce the kind of earnings that are truly gifted and
qualified management should be able to produce. And so I
think we're realizing that the lowering of standards is a
(44:02):
very bad idea, and so therefore we may be going
through and I hope we are a corrective period of
time where and I think your book The Gay Affair
contributes to the argument very significantly. I hope people will
read it and will study it and think seriously about it.
Now are you in academics today, What are you doing
(44:24):
right now?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Well? I took early retirement from Vanderbilt in twenty seventeen,
and I reinvented myself as a political commentator, author, and
I have three small businesses. But I left academia earlier
than I anticipated because it was not a good environment
(44:46):
for a Christian conservative, and so pretty much I could
not afford to take Harvard on. And with Harvard having
a fifty three billion dollar endowment, there are very few
people who can. And I would like this book to
be part of holding them accountable. And perhaps there are
(45:07):
people that are on that among the Harvard alumni like you,
or the administrators, or people will commit it to higher
education who will begin to change the culture on campuses.
It's important for institutions of higher learning to police themselves.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
I agree, and it's got to start happening. And I
commend you for writing this book. I think all the
books you've written in your work has been excellent. I
think your scholarship is superior, and you're thinking has always
been outstanding and challenging. And this book deserves to be
widely read. So doctor Swain, thank you for joining us
(45:52):
in good luck with this book. Let's again thank you.
Let's again show it Chris, so we can show the book.
It is The Gay Affair and it's Harvard Plagiarism and
the Death of academic integrity by doctor Carol Swain. And
it's available in bookstores. It's available at Amazon in the
(46:13):
paperback and in an audiobook version. And doctor Swain, good luck,
and I hope to see you soon. And God bless,
thank you for joining us today. And I always end
up by say in the end, God's always going to win.
God will win here too. Thank you, and I commend
your work. And I'm proud to be your friend.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
It's mutual.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Thank you so much, God Bless, thank you very much.
Good luck with the book.
More angels of this doctor Drome Corsi, and we have
a special guest with us today. We've got doctor Carol Swain.
Doctor Swain, how are you today.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I am doing great, and thank you so much for
having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I'm really looking forward to this. You have a new
book out, and I think it's a really exciting and
important book. It's called The Gay Affair and it's Harvard
plagiarism and the death of academic integrity. Now, this is
really interesting because Clouding Gay was the president of Harvard,
(00:42):
which is I think probably one of the most prestigious
positions you can have in academics, and yet she was
found to be a plagiarist a doctoral dissertation and one
of the people that she plagiarized the most with doctor Swain.
(01:03):
And so this is really extremely interesting because I think
it demonstrates the corruption of this DEI diversity, equity and
inclusion agenda that has dominated our universities. And especially interviewing
doctor Swain this week, right after President Trump has been
(01:24):
re elected and now has been reinaugurated as president and
has impact. Yesterday by executive order ended all DEI programs
in the federal government, closed down the DEI departments throughout
the bureaucracy. It's really timely that we have doctor Swain
on to explain her book and what happened to her
(01:48):
and what she learned from all this, which is going
to be fascinating. So doctor Swain, welcome and congratulations on
the publication of your book.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I'd like to point out too that the release day
it was January second, twenty twenty five, which is the
anniversary of Claudine Gay's resignation from Harvard.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
That's interesting was that coincidental or were able to arrange
it was done deliberately? Deliberately? Okay, well to Shay, how
did you find out that Claudine Gay had plagiarized your work?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I received a phone call from doctor Art laffer on
December tenth, twenty twenty three, and it was a Sunday evening,
probably around eight. And I'm friends with Art Laugher, but
we're not friends like Jerome. I don't expect you to
call me Sunday evening. But when the phone rang, he
(02:50):
asked me if I had heard about the president of
Harvard University that she had been accused of pleasure ride
her dissertation, And he said, and guess who she pleasurized you.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
That must have been a shock to you to hear that.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It was a shock because it occurred twenty six years
ago and I was just finding out about it. And
then the phone started to ring. Doctor Laugher encouraged me
to go to Chris Rufo's X page, and I went
there and I saw that he had published an article
and that I was in the article. And at that
time there were two instances identified of pleasurism, and I
(03:35):
did not want to rush to judgment. I wanted to
read her work before I decided how serious it was,
because at that time I was willing to give her
the benefit of a doubt. I thought, well, maybe it
was accidental, maybe you know, she just left off quotation marks.
But I started reading her work and I became very,
very troubled. That was my first reaction, was being trouble.
(03:59):
But then when her very quickly came out and defended
her and said that she had not engaged in pleasurism
but duplicative language without attribution, then I became angry. And
that anger consumed me for several weeks until I was
able to work my way through it. And I did
(04:21):
work my way through it, I calmed down totally. And
then January second, when she released her statement and she resigned,
she blamed racism in part, and then that caused my
blood to boil. I'd already been contacted by an attorney
who said he wanted to take the case pro bono.
(04:43):
I contacted that attorney and I told him that he
could send his demand letter to Harvard.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Right and the work that she plagiarized, what was the
work of yours that was plagiarized.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
It's my first book, Blackfaces, Black Interests, The Representaation of
African Americans in Congress, published in nineteen ninety three, updated
in nineteen ninety five, and it came out of my
own dissertation research that was funded by the National Science
Foundation that involved me traveling around with white and black
members of Congress to answer the question how well does
(05:19):
the US Congress represent African American interests? And that book
won three national prizes, including the highest price the political
scientists can win that at the time, that was the
Woodrow Wilson Foundation Prize. It's the name has been changed
because Woodrow Wilson is no longer he's politically incorrect. And
(05:39):
it won the dB Hartman Award for Best Book on
Congress and shared the vok Award for Best Book on
Southern Politics. And so the book was a splash, and
its biggest contribution was that it identified a trade off
between a descriptive representation having more people in office who
look like you, and substantive representation having people who support
(06:04):
your agenda. And I argue that political party was more
important than the race of the representative. And I questioned
the drawing of majority black legislative districts. At the time,
I was a Democrat, and you know my research. I
went where my research took me. And I can tell you, Jerome,
that people would come up to me and say, you know,
(06:25):
this is such a wonderful book. It's just so amazing.
No one can guess your race by reading the book.
And I'm thinking, no one should be able to guess
my race by reading the book. I wanted to be
a congressional scholar, and I wanted to be the best
congressional scholar I could be, And so that ended up
being my tenure book. And it received three citations from
(06:50):
the US Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
And it's interesting because your work establishes that what a
person believes is more important than their political party, if
I'm hearing you correctly. In other words, that explain what
the how the party and the person's belief interact those
two variables.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I the treade off was you could have more people
in office who looked like you and less representation, and
so having more black faces. The title of the book
black Faces, Black Interests the representation of African Americans in Congress.
And at that time there was a big debate about
(07:33):
drawing majority black legislative districts. The argument was that the
districts had to be sixty five percent black or greater.
I questioned that, and I also met the argument that
whites would support black candidates, and that sometimes your best
representative is not a member of your group, that whites
could represent blacks and blacks could represent whites. And so
(07:57):
I met the case for substantive presentation, people who can
actually get out there and support your agenda. And it
wasn't just role called votes. I looked at I traveled
to various districts based on the demographic characteristics of the district.
I came up with my own indicator of black interests,
(08:18):
and I chose districts I looked at white representatives of
majority black districts, black representatives of black districts, black representatives
of white districts, black and white representatives of mixed districts.
And the book for some people was controversial because it
it disagreed with those who argue that only blacks could
(08:41):
represent black interests. And so with Claudine Gay, there was
some verbatim theft of words and sentences, but the idea
her I would I argue in the book that her
research question was basically came out of my conclusion. She
was challenging my research without doing it the way scholars
(09:04):
are taught to do it. Like if you want to
challenge a scholar, if you do your literature review, you're
supposed to state their position and what's wrong with their position,
take them apart, not ignore them. And in her dissertation,
I believe she has one citation of my work, but
not in the setup. It's as if she came up
(09:25):
with this original idea on her own. And it wasn't
just the dissertation. Some of her other articles also drew
heavily on ideas in my work.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
But she was arguing essentially that caluding. Gay's argument was
that you had to have black representatives representing black policy
or black views or you know, issues, And she was
really opposed to your conclusions.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yes, yes, and she But what she did was used
my work as a strong man for.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Her without attribution to you, or without arguing that you
had both positive the other side of the argument. Yeah.
In other words, it was intellectually dishonest. In other words,
had she say, okay, doctor Swain has written this book
and here are her conclusions, and had represented fairly what
you had done, and then she on her own said
(10:23):
here's why I disagree. Here's my evidence at arguments as
to why I disagree. That would have been honest and legitimate. Correct.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, and you know what I think was going on.
I mean, my book made quite a splash at the
time because there was a debate going on. In fact,
it was resolved by the Supreme Court whether or not
it was constitutional to draw majority black legislative districts, and
at that time the court struck down districts that had
(10:52):
been drawn sixty five percent black or greater. And my book,
one of the reasons that it made such an impact
was that I argued that it was not the right
right strategy to draw the overwhelmingly black districts, that they
were not needed because whites would support blacks, and that
(11:15):
black representation was contingent on Democrats being able to organize
the Congress, and if the Democrats ever lost control of
the Congress, they would lose Black power. And that happened
the year after my book was published, and at that
time there was this hue and cry by the NAACP
(11:35):
and all kinds of progressive groups saying that black representation
in Congress was going to end. One person argued that
the number of blacks left in Congress would fit in
the back of a taxicab. I wrote a Congressional Quarterly
article that the blacks would be re elected because of
the incumbency advantage. And so, I mean, I just did
(11:56):
good political science, and I was right.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Well, and there's a fundamental point here, which is that
a lot of the civil rights legislation going back to
the Johnson administration has been predicated on the fact that,
you know, race is a critical determinant of what somebody
(12:19):
is going to believe or how they're going to behave.
So therefore racial preferences, in order to account for or
to redress past discrimination would be required, and that only
through that could black interests be fully representative in the
(12:45):
legislature and legislation and public policy. And what you're saying
is basically that you know that right whites can and
do support black people. Understand stood on the basis that
were all human beings races inconsequential.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Well, let me tell you that this book again was
published in nineteen ninety three, and as part of my research,
I looked at the districts very closely, the registration levels,
voter registration levels, and turnout, and at that time, forty
percent of the blacks in Congress were being elected from
districts there were not majority black on election day because
(13:28):
once you factored in the registration levels the turnout, they
were already being elected by whites. And so it was
controversial when I argued that whites would support black candidates
and when blacks lost, they lost because of their liberal
views and not because of their race. Because even then
it was clear to me that Democrats that had a
(13:50):
problem with race that they probably you know, they probably
had gone elsewhere that that was not going to be
a huge detriment to blacks getting elected in the nineteen nineties.
So that was pretty much my argument. I won the
national prizes, I got early tenure at Princeton, but I
also got labeled as a conservative. And in the book
(14:13):
I argue that there's no way that Podingue's dissertation committee
was not aware of my work, and it was. In
some ways it may have been like a counseling because
they needed a high profile black person to counter what
I was saying. And I think that council culture. We
labeled it a few years ago, but it's been going
(14:35):
on for a long time, and I don't think it's
uncommon for progressives to not cite the work of people
that they deemed as conservative. And at the time I
was a Democrat. I was not seeking to become a Republican.
I was just seeking to be a good political scientist.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Right, But your argument had political consequences, yes it did,
and that and so suddenly you found yourself being repudiated
by Claudine Gay, who is a rising star in the
Eastern University establishment and kind of deemed to be, you know,
(15:15):
the kind of person that could be promoted to be
president of Harvard based on her leftist in ideological orientation
and her attractiveness as a person and so therefore when
they refuted your where they refuted your arguments, they didn't
(15:37):
even give you the acknowledgment that you existed. They didn't
even want to. They just ignored you entirely while refuting you.
And it was kind of like a wink wink to
those who knew what was going on, that they knew
you were being refuted, but they didn't want anybody reading
your work on its own or evaluating it independently. They
(15:57):
didn't want you to be seen.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Well, I mean, that's true that there's been a not
wanting me to be seen. But Claudine Gay was a
student while I was at Princeton, and I heard of her.
And I talk about the fact that I heard of
this brilliant black woman at Harvard, and that's all I
could hear about this brilliant woman. And I did not
(16:20):
realize that she I didn't follow her work closely because
my work moved in another direction, and that is why.
And as I became more conservative, I saw of stop
going to the meetings, and I was totally unaware that
her work had tracked so closely my work, her early work,
and that these things had happened. I'd never read her dissertation,
(16:45):
and so it was twenty six years later that I
discovered what happened. And then, you know, then when I
read her work and saw all the places where she
should have cited me, and she didn't cite me. And
when I did my dissertation, you know, I guess I
had a book on how to write a dissertation. I
did a thorough literature review. And there is a scholar
(17:06):
who's deceased now named Hannah Pitkin. She wrote the seminal
path breaking book on representation, and so I cite Hannah.
She doesn't cite Hannah or me yet she's dealing with representation,
and so there were so many shortcuts in her research.
And I believe that it was because she had to
(17:26):
write pedigree. She was from Phillips, Exeter Academy, Undergrade Education, Princeton,
and Stanford PhD. Harvard, and she just was perfect for
the narrative. And I believe that she was pushed and
that the progressors did not care because I was not
(17:48):
important enough.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Well, and also they didn't want to acknowledge you. So
I few would go and actually seek you out and
read what you had written. Hae, you been acknowledged. It
would have drawn attention to your work, and serious scholars
would have said, wait a minute, this work demands some attention.
They didn't want to risk that, so that was you're
(18:11):
already canceled while you know, in the process of being
plagiarized and refuted.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Well, you know something, the journalist that I discussed in
the book who uncovered the pleasurism apparently the rumors had
been circulating for years and doctor, I mean, I'm not
called in gay. She cited some of the derivative work
of scholars, and she pledgiarized some of those people who
(18:38):
actually cited my work and built on my work and
handled it the way they were supposed to handle it.
She cited them, but not me.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Well, she was a pick rising star. She had the
right qualifications, starting with that she was woken, intellectually aligned
with the values that this hard left wanted to promote.
So she was picked for that. She fit their narrative.
(19:12):
She embodied their narrative. They can represent her as brilliant.
They didn't mind that she stole. She was politically on
the side of the argument they wanted to advance. And
the left has always utilized the divisions of race in
other words to say that you know, only blacks can
(19:32):
represent blacks, only blacks can understand blacks racially defining how
knowledge is organized, when the fact is knowledge is not
race dependent, right, And that's what your work revealed, is
that knowledge is what people believe and how people think
is not race dependent. And there are bigots on every
(19:57):
side of the race card that you want to play
in the airp people who are sympathetic and understand that
race is not a determining characteristic, which is you know,
if you go back to Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King,
you know, I was his whole position was, we want
equal opportunity. We don't want special privileges, we don't want
(20:20):
special concessions. We just want to eliminate the discrimination, the barriers,
and that we're allowed to compete on the equal plane.
We'll do just fine because talent and intellect and all
the other qualifications are not race distributed. And so therefore
that was his argument, whereas this hard left went exactly
(20:43):
the other way and saying, no, only only blacks can
understand blacks, only blacks can determine the agenda.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
And you know, my research quest and that sort of
prepared started my the idea for the dissertation came from
all these articles I was reading. This made the case
that black representation would soon end because there were only
two majority black districts represented by white people Lindy Boggs
(21:12):
in Louisiana Peter Ordino in New Jersey, and that as
soon as those districts were claimed, black representation would end.
And so my question was, is it really true that
only blacks can represent blacks? And I can tell you
that my career has been advanced by me just asking
(21:32):
simple questions like that and pursuing the evidence wherever it led.
And so I was not persuaded that they were right
that only blacks could represent black interests. And so that
was what was behind my research, which was funded by
the National Science Foundation. I got a grant for eleven
thousand dollars in the late nineteen eighties, which was a
(21:54):
lot of money for a student.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
In your book, again, let's highlight the book. The book
is The Gay Affair, and it's subtitled Harvard Plagiarism and
the Death of Academic Integrity. And we're going to get
into those issues in a minute. But it's available in
both a paperback form and it's an audio book.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
As well, Yes, and it's where of a book a soul,
but it's always easy for people to go to Amazon sometimes.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
And there's the Amazon listening. We're showing it on the
screen now for those watching the podcast, and I want
to continue. You also discuss in your book Kamala Harris
and that she was a plagiarist as well. You want
to get into that subject because that's pretty interesting given
that she just lost the presidential race rather significantly in
(22:48):
a landslide to Donald Trump and his re election effort,
and lost the popular vote, lost all the swing states,
and lost a substantial majority in the electoral college. So
it was really a solid win for Donald Trump over Kamala.
(23:08):
And I don't think it had to do with race
as much as it had to do with her radical
leftist orientation. He woke nature earn her. She was just
a terrible candidate with a a very undistinguished, indistinguished background.
And in that background you revealed it included plagiarism. Correct.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yes, And also in the book, I talk about pleasure
writis that there's a pandemic affecting higher education, and so
the book is not just about Claudine Gay, it discussed
other high profile pleasurists and the fact that there is
no accountability. And yes, Kamala Harris it was exposed during
(23:51):
the campaign as having lifted passages from other research for
her book on crime. And it seems to be that
there seems to be a trend of foot among the
left to redefine pleasurism. Harvard tried to do it when
they called Clodinay's actions duplicative language without attribution. And I
(24:15):
think it's very dangerous for higher education because it sends
the wrong signal to lesser institutions, and also through K
through twelve education, there are teachers out there trying to
drill in that student's proper ways to do research with integrity. Meanwhile,
you have our leaders cutting corners.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Well if you can, your book, the death of your subtitle,
the death of academic integrity is really I think at
the heart of what your book is about. Yes, because
what your argument is I readn't look at it is
that essentially the academic enterprise has become politicized and so therefore,
(25:01):
as long as your conclusions are sufficiently to the radical left,
neo Marxist or cultural Maoist or critical race theory or
critical gender theory. It doesn't matter that you follow the
rules of not being a plagiarist, of proper attribution of sources,
(25:23):
of direct quotations, being representative direct quotations. I mean fundamentally,
the radical left is legitimating intellectual theft.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
They are and they have the media because you're not
going to sell very many books if you cannot get
exposure for your ideas. So it's almost impossible if you're
a conservative unless you're well connected. You can get on Fox,
you know, on a regular basis, and Newsmax. For the
most part, the left will not give conservative scholars the
(25:59):
same attention. And with my book Blackfaces Black Interest, the
representation of African Americans in Congress, I was at Princeton,
but I was also a Democrat, and I was supported
by Democrats that were concerned about where our country was headed.
And so my book got lots of attention. But as
(26:22):
I became more conservative, it's been a lot harder to
get exposure for ideas that cut against the grain.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Right because they are not They do not want to
promote your views which are not a radicalization of race
such that it fits into the identity politics identity politics
is all about divisions, yes, and I mean I almost
(26:52):
think it becomes schizophrenic and that whatever your particular orientation is,
as long as your radical life, even if it's schizophrenic
in terms of your identification as a person or sexually
or any other way, that that's got to be celebrated
by everybody.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Well, I mean, things are changing, and I don't know
how we'll shake out in the end because we have
followed the wrong path for so long. And the other
thing that my book does is it talks about how
copyright law. That was how I legally wanted to pursue
a case against Harvard. It's not a good vehicle for
(27:36):
that because it protects copyright holders, but the theft of
ideas that's not protected. Institutions have to police their own members,
and so there was a time when journalistic organizations and
colleges and universities they would police and deal with breaches
(27:57):
of academic integrity. No more. They seem to be doing
a wink wink when it comes to pleasurism in their ranks.
And I think it's because they value the people who
engage in it as long as they're pushing the right ideas.
They don't want to punish those people.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Well, it try to mean, you know, you can see
it all over Joe Biden making, you know, essentially engaging
in bribery with Ukraine, with China, with Russia, Russia selling
political favors for personal gain. And here's Donald Trump, which
(28:36):
who suffered all these indictments over cases that were very,
very weak, all of which have been losing or dismissed
or ultimately will be reversed on an appeal. And yet
it's his because of his political orientation, which is America
first and traditional values, He's not going He's going to
(28:57):
try to destroy the wok agenda. Right, He's persecuted. And
those are the left, regardless of the egregious crimes they commit,
are excused. Yes, And I think your Claudia Gay case,
I mean you actually sued Harvard and how did that go?
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Well, I didn't file the complaint, and in the book
I talk about the factors that led me. At the
last minute, when the lawyers had the complaint drawn, I
decided not to file it. And it was after I
had a conversation with the law professor friend of mine
who really used an analogy that caught my attention. He
(29:38):
talked about Hamas attacking Israel and how as a consequence,
you know, Israel was able to wipe out much of Gaza.
His point was that don't pick a fight with someone
that can wipe you out. And he was afraid that
if I pursued it and lost, and he pointed out
(30:01):
to me in a way, my lawyers hadn't that undercopyright law,
loser pays, that I could end up having to pay
for Harvard's lawyers as well as my own. And I
had already been told that it would cost between one
hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars just to
go to trial. And so at the last minute, after
we had let us have gone back and forth, and
(30:24):
the complaint had been written ready to be filed, I
decided that I should follow a different path. And the
book is my different path. And in the appendices I
had the letters. I had the side by side of
Claudine Gay's work and my work and the complaint so
(30:45):
that people can actually see my case, that is my
case that I would have filed if I had gone
to court. I could never be sure what kind of
judge I would get. I would have filed in Tennessee
and in Nashville, and if I ended up with the
kinds of judges that Donald Trump had just being a
black Democrat, being a black Republican challenging Harvard, you know,
(31:10):
I'm not sure that I would have gotten a fair trial,
and so I did not want to risk it because
I have grandchildren, great grandchildren, I have, you know, I'm
at retirement age. There was too much risk for me
financially to go forward. And so the book The Gay Affair, Harvard, Pleasurerism,
(31:31):
and the Death of Academic Integrity is my way of
holding Harvard accountable. And I'm hoping that it will make
a difference, that people will read it and they will
understand that they are problems with copyright law when it
comes to academia, and that maybe changes need to be
made in copyright law itself. Pleasurism itself is not a misdemeanor,
(31:54):
it's not a felony. It has to be policed by institutions,
and institutions of higher education had to decide are they
going to be in the business of education or politics.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
And right now they're in the business of politics. And
that's pretty clear now. Claudine Gay resigned, and I'm convinced
it was your raising the issue of her plagiarism that
led to that resignation. But yet she turned out quite well,
didn't she. What's her current status at Harvard.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Well, she landed on her feet. She was able to
keep I don't know for how long her nine hundred
thousand dollars a year salary.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
That she had at nine hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
A year, almost a million dollar salary. And this past
fall she taught a course on research and writing for
African American studies. I would have loved to have been
a fly on the wall to see how she handled
that course on research and writing.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah, whether she discussed plagiarism at all, or whether she
at Eddie rules of what you should do with academic discourse.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
And this other thing with Harvard is that they have
just pretty much totally ignored me. She made some corrections
to her dissertation because there were forty seven identified instances
of duplicative language without attribution involving a number of people,
(33:27):
and she corrected a handful of those, but she never,
as far as I know, corrected anything that pertained to
my work. She never called me to apologize. And I
say in the book that if she had ever picked
up the phone and made a phone call and told
me she was sorry that she made a mistake knowing me,
that would have been the end of it. I would
(33:49):
not have written the book. But the whole idea that
they would just totally ignore me as insult to injury.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Right, and the whole corruption. And my PhD's from Harvard.
So I was at Harvard. I graduated, got my PhD
in nineteen seventy two. Now Harvard of twenty twenty five
is very different than Harvard of nineteen seventy two, but
it was already beginning. I mean, the leftist control of
(34:22):
the university was already pretty apparent that that was going
to be in the ascendancy. This was during the Vietnam War.
And I got to Harvard nineteen sixty eight, which just
in just in the months before the takeover of University
Hall by the students in a protest same time, when
(34:43):
Columbia University was being taken over by the students the
administrative building in Columbia University and universities around the country
in protests to the Vietnam War. Largely but again this
was on the heels of the civil rights movement. It
was on the whole issue which had been developing that
(35:08):
was moving far left of Martin Luther King, who was,
by the way, a Republican I know, and not a Democrat,
and the whole, the whole nature of the debate which
has become radicalized towards race and not followed the path
(35:34):
that Martin Luther King had wanted it to follow. Ironically,
I think has ended up with a society in which,
in general, there's much less racial discrimination that I see
in the society today as when I was a child
in the nineteen fifties. I was very aware of it.
In the nineteen fifties, I would fly into Washington National
(35:58):
I spent a lot of time in Washington and even
as a kid with my father, and it is in general,
and you'd see the lunch counters and the black women
and men would be serving the food, but the cashiers
would always be white, right. And I noticed that right
away when I was just a child, and said that
(36:20):
this just isn't right. I mean, it just had a
you know, the but that's gone to a large extent,
that's gone. And now the use of race has become
to the discrimination of whites. It's turned the other way.
The left has really turned it around to your illegitimate
(36:46):
unless you're a person of color.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
I agree, And in twenty twenty three, I published another book,
The Adversity of Diversity, The Adversity of Diversity and I.
The subtitle was about how the Supreme Court decision to
end race based college admissions would spell the end of
DEI and that was published August twenty twenty three and
(37:13):
pretty much totally ignored I got it right, And in
that book, pretty much I say that we got it
right in the nineteen sixties when we passed the nineteen
sixty four Civil Rights Act, and it was closer to
the equal protection clus of the Constitution, and that Americans
they don't have a problem. We want non discrimination, equal opportunity,
(37:37):
and outreach. Those are the values and goals that Americans endorsed.
But DEI became affirmative action on steroids. And when President
Trump signed the executive order ending the DEI in the
federal government among contractors, he also signed an executive order
(38:02):
ending affirmative action.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
So not just splaining, I think your book is really
about the death of the academic integrity, and it has,
it's making some very important statements about the nature of
racial relations in the United States, because I think we're
we're seeing now the end of DEI certainly with Donald
(38:27):
Trump and the Supreme Court moving towards saying that racial
preferences are inherently suspect, which means that kind of the
original Martin Luther King idea of racial equality equal opportunity
is being revisited and reinstated. I think that's really I
(38:50):
mean where we need to go. Martin Luther King used
to talk about how race was not that important, it's
not a defining characteristic in human beings. On that, you know,
there's blacks who have excelled in every area you can
think of endeavor on What is fundamental human condition is
(39:12):
the ability to raise children and return to God and
families and develop a culture that is based upon learning
and respect for God, not its values. And I think
you would agree with that.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
I would agree with it, And I would also point
out that, you know, it's been about sixty years since
the passage of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four,
and we are at a new place in America. There
are probably close to eight states that are either majority
minority or will be so soon, and so the old
(39:48):
ways of doing things have to change or have to change.
And I believe that President Trump's decisions with the executive
orders was absolutely the right thing that needed to happen.
He had the courage to do it. Now, going back
to Claudine Gay in the book, a couple of places
(40:09):
I point out that I see her as a victim
of DEI as someone that was pushed further than she
should have been pushed. The record that she presented for
tenure at Stanford would not have gotten her tenure at
Princeton when I earned my tenure. And there's been a
lourn of standards. In the purpose of the book, I
(40:31):
talk about born in Bach, they wrote a book in
nineteen ninety eight, The Shape of the River, and in
that book they talked about affirmative action and the need
for it, and that if you didn't have aggressive affirmative action,
that you would not have black leaders. And I believe
that Claudine Gay and some of the blacks that we've
(40:53):
seen since then, some of the younger ones, were pushed
through under a standard that was much lower than previous
generations of blacks who made it into academia.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Well, I think that merit is the fundamental issue and
all human endeavor. I think it's one again that the
left has opposed. It's given participations, awards and sports instead
of winners and losers. It's all kinds of things that
try to emphasize that these you know, should who you
(41:27):
are should determine the result, not whether you're you know,
your capability to perform the task. And we've seen the
results of that, and that companies that are led by
DEI are not producing the most effective products. And you know,
you can't have airplanes where the doors fall off or
(41:48):
the you know, the airplane seeses work in one way
or the other. It's got to be built correctly.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
But I would also say that the divisiveness that's come
out of the aggressive critical race theory and DEI has
been detrimental to our society. And there's a strong sense
of entitlement and there are many people that have been
taught to believe that someone has stolen from them that
(42:16):
had it not been, you know, for white oppression, that
they would be further along. And I believe that those
ideas have been detrimental. They've set blacks back in other groups,
and there has been a lowering of standards pushed by
white progressives. And when it comes to pleasurism, it's not
(42:37):
just something that Claudine Gay and black scholars have engaged in.
There are plenty of high profile white people that have also.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Engaged in it.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
And some of the ones that were charged or with
pleasurism Dorris Kerns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Kevin Cruz, and Malcolm Gladwell.
There are lots of people that are white. And what
I see is that progressives have just redefined pleasurism, especially
(43:11):
when it involves people that they value.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
It's the universities have got to be or academic integrity.
The churches have got to be not about liberation theology,
but about God and Jesus Christ or the true religious values.
You can't have businesses where people are promoted onto the
(43:37):
boards and advanced into senior management based on race. They
have to be able to do the job. They have
to have the qualifications that ESG is not going to
produce the kind of earnings that are truly gifted and
qualified management should be able to produce. And so I
think we're realizing that the lowering of standards is a
(44:02):
very bad idea, and so therefore we may be going
through and I hope we are a corrective period of
time where and I think your book The Gay Affair
contributes to the argument very significantly. I hope people will
read it and will study it and think seriously about it.
Now are you in academics today, What are you doing
(44:24):
right now?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Well? I took early retirement from Vanderbilt in twenty seventeen,
and I reinvented myself as a political commentator, author, and
I have three small businesses. But I left academia earlier
than I anticipated because it was not a good environment
(44:46):
for a Christian conservative, and so pretty much I could
not afford to take Harvard on. And with Harvard having
a fifty three billion dollar endowment, there are very few
people who can. And I would like this book to
be part of holding them accountable. And perhaps there are
(45:07):
people that are on that among the Harvard alumni like you,
or the administrators, or people will commit it to higher
education who will begin to change the culture on campuses.
It's important for institutions of higher learning to police themselves.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
I agree, and it's got to start happening. And I
commend you for writing this book. I think all the
books you've written in your work has been excellent. I
think your scholarship is superior, and you're thinking has always
been outstanding and challenging. And this book deserves to be
widely read. So doctor Swain, thank you for joining us
(45:52):
in good luck with this book. Let's again thank you.
Let's again show it Chris, so we can show the book.
It is The Gay Affair and it's Harvard Plagiarism and
the Death of academic integrity by doctor Carol Swain. And
it's available in bookstores. It's available at Amazon in the
(46:13):
paperback and in an audiobook version. And doctor Swain, good luck,
and I hope to see you soon. And God bless,
thank you for joining us today. And I always end
up by say in the end, God's always going to win.
God will win here too. Thank you, and I commend
your work. And I'm proud to be your friend.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
It's mutual.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Thank you so much, God Bless, thank you very much.
Good luck with the book.
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