Dr. Carol M. Swain said her new book examining former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism of multiple academic scholars’ work was her way of getting her story out about the scandal as opposed to fighting a pricey legal battle with the university.
In December 2023, Gay was accused of plagiarizing her 1997 PhD dissertation in which she appeared to pull materials from multiple authors, including from Swain’s prize-winning first book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress.
Swain said she decided to write and publish her new book titled The Gay Affair: Harvard, Plagiarism, and the Death of Academic about the scandal after Harvard and Gay’s attorney strongly warned Swain in a letter against filing a lawsuit.
“The letter said, first, that ideas are not protected, that it was de minimis, meaning that she didn’t take that much. Then, he argued that it was fair use and also warned that I could end up paying legal fees for a frivolous lawsuit and, under copyright law, loser pays…Even to go to trial, it would have cost me between $100,000 and $250,000,” Swain explained on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Instead, Swain said she published her new book for the public to learn about the scandal, explaining how in the book she includes documents and side by side visuals to show where the plagiarism occurred in Gay’s dissertation.
“What I decided was to get my story out, and in the book, there are the legal documents, there are excerpted letters…the side by side of what she took and what I wrote,” Swain said.
“Some people can afford to file a lawsuit and lose. I wanted to get my side out in the public domain and the book is the way I did it. The book is a very short read, it could be read in a couple of hours. If someone wanted to go into the documents, they could go into the documents,” Swain added.
Noting how her book was released on January 2, the anniversary of Gay’s resignation from Harvard, Swain said if the former university president would have apologized and taken responsibility for plagiarizing her work, she would not have published The Gay Affair.
“I say twice in the book that if she had ever contacted me and apologized that there would be no book and there would not have been the potential of a lawsuit,” Swain said.
“I don’t think that she believes she did anything wrong,” Swain added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
