Dr. Carol M. Swain said her new book titled The Gay Affair: Harvard, Plagiarism, and the Death of Academic not only examines former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism of multiple academic scholars’ work but also serves as a warning to universities around the nation to hold both students and faculty to the same standards when it comes to plagiarism.
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.
On Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Swain said her new book, The Gay Affair, details how 47 total instances of plagiarism were identified in Gay’s work, five of which were from Swain’s award-winning Black Faces, Black Interests book.
“Part of my argument is that her dissertation, where some of the plagiarism occurred, actually occurred in three quarters of her writings, but her dissertation is the document that we have to produce to get a PhD and to be called a doctor. It had multiple instances of plagiarism and part of my contention is that her research question was based on a conclusion of my work. She didn’t come out at the same place because her work was written to counter my work, but she did not follow traditional academic standards as far as a literature review,” Swain explained.
Swain said if it wasn’t for her Black Faces, Black Interests book, Gay (pictured above, left) would not have had the dissertation she submitted in the first place.
“If you’re going to challenge someone’s work or take them down, you’re supposed to say who you’re taking down. Lay out the argument and then dissect our work and demonstrate how what you’re doing is better. She did none of that…There would not have been a Claudine Gay dissertation on her topic had it not been for my prize winning book,” Swain said.
Swain also said her latest book details the wide range of emotions she felt after finding the plagiarism in Gay’s dissertation.
“The way the book is laid out, it talks about when I first learned that I had been plagiarized and the range of emotions that I went through, first being concerned enough to read her work, then anger, and then finally coming to peace with the anger, and then when she resigned and basically blamed racism and Harvard defended her as a great scholar, I got angry all over again,” Swain said.
Aside from her examination of Gay’s plagiarism, Swain said she wrote her latest book as an effort to encourage universities to set the same standards when it comes to plagiarism to both students and faculty in order to uphold the academic “enterprise.”
“The purpose of the book is to hold Harvard and Claudine Gay accountable, but also to alert other institutions that if the whole academic enterprise is to mean anything, they have to be able to police not just students, but also faculty,” Swain stressed.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Image “Claudine Gay” by Harvard University and “Dr. Carol M. Swain” is by Carol M. Swain.
