One of the academics who accused Harvard president Claudine Gay of plagiarizing her work has blasted the Ivy League school for redefining plagiarism by standing by her side — claiming she was only spared because she was “its first black president.”
Carol Swain, a former professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, spoke hours after Harvard said it was standing by the embattled president — even while admitting some of his academic work needed to be corrected after an investigation into alleged plagiarism.
“I feel like his entire research agenda, his entire career, is based on my work,” Swain told Fox News Digital about Gay’s allegations of lifting some without proper attribution.
“My blood pressure rose today because of Harvard’s decision that what he did did not constitute plagiarism, and it did not rise to the level of his expulsion,” he said.
“My message to Harvard is this: You cannot redefine what plagiarism is. Most of us know what plagiarism is,” he said.
“It’s an affront to the intelligence what Harvard University has done,” he said of the outrage that also involved Gay’s congressional testimony about antisemitism at the school.
Carol Swain, a former political science professor at Vanderbilt University whom Harvard President Claudine Gay accused of plagiarizing, argued that the Ivy League is trying to “redefine” the term to protect Gay. Fox News
The Harvard Corporation’s decision to support the embattled president “is deeply demeaning to everyone, not just racial and ethnic minorities, but anyone who’s ever worked in a school, who’s written a paper, who’s tried to follow the guidelines,” he lamented.
Swain suggested Gay “gets a free pass” because he is a product of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, echoing claims made by hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman.
“Clearly, the Harvard Corporation didn’t have the guts to fire its first black president, someone who shouldn’t have been promoted in the first place,” said Swain, who is also black.
“They’ve decided that they’d rather lower the standards for everybody than hold them up – the most people attend elite schools in America, you know, to the same standards that ordinary Americans are held to.”
Harvard should “use the same standards for [Gay] because they would apply to white people in the same situation,” Swain also told City Journal.
“A white man may be gone,” he claimed.
Swain still hopes Gay will “step down” from his position, following in the footsteps of former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill who lost her job in the scandal after her congressional testimony about antisemitism and calls for genocide.
“I hope the pressure doesn’t let up until he does that because he’s hurting academia, he’s hurting black people,” Swain said.
Gay was accused of lifting the work of other scholars in his 1997 Ph.D. thesis and the writing of four papers published between 1993 and 2017 that do not have proper attribution. Reuters
Gay was accused of lifting the work of other scholars in his 1997 Ph.D. thesis and the writing of four papers published between 1993 and 2017 that lacked proper attribution, the Washington Free Beacon found.
The outlet said scholars it consulted agreed Gay had “violated core principles of academic integrity” and said they had found 10 instances where Gay had retracted a sentence or paragraph and changed only a word or two.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation – the Ivy League’s top governing body – said officials became aware of the plagiarism allegations in late October and initiated an independent review.
“On December 9, Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed several examples of inadequate citations.
On Tuesday, university officials expressed their support for Gay to remain president — despite apparently admitting he had committed plagiarism. Reuters
“Although the analysis found no violations of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay proactively requested four corrections in two articles to include citations and quotation marks omitted from the original publication.”
The revelations about Gay’s alleged plagiarism come as the university’s leader has come under fire following a disastrous congressional hearing last week in which he stopped short of denouncing Harvard students who called for a “global intifada” on the grounds of free speech.
“We accept a commitment to freedom of expression – even unsavory, offensive views [and] hate,” Gay said last week. “When that speech conflicts with behavior that violates our policy against bullying and harassment. The speech did not pass that barrier.”
Gay has already come under fire for failing to denounce Harvard students who called for the genocide of Jews. Reuters
In the ensuing firestorm, a bipartisan group of congressmen introduced a resolution calling for Gay’s resignation.
Rep. New York’s Elise Stefanik authored the resolution, which “strongly condemns the rise of antisemitism on university campuses across the country” and President Magill, Gay, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sally Kornbluth for “their failure to state clearly that calls for genocide Jews are a nuisance and a violation of their institutional code of conduct.”
The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the resolution — which also calls for Kornbluth’s removal from MIT — this week, according to the Harvard Crimson.
“This is not a partisan issue, but a matter of moral clarity,” Stefanik, a Republican, said in a statement.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana, also argued that Stefanik’s question about whether calls for genocide violate their code of conduct is “not a difficult question — in fact, it’s probably the easiest question.
Rep. The New Yorker’s Elise Stefanik asked Gay, as well as former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth whether calls for genocide violated their school’s code of conduct. Reuters
“The abysmal failure of these presidents to defend the most basic of human rights – the right to exist – against hypothetical wokeism exposes the moral bankruptcy of this elite university to the world,” Scalise said in a statement.
Rep. Democrat Jared Moskowitz, of Florida, also called Stefanik’s question a “softball question.”
“That’s not a trick question, and it’s annoying that these young leaders will try to cover it up with some nonsense about ‘it depends on the context.’
“Substitute ‘Jews’ for any other persecuted minority group and they will never provide that answer,” he argued, saying university leaders “fail the test, and just like their students, there is no makeup.”
MIT has repeatedly stood by Kornbluth, telling The Post on Wednesday that the school and its president “reject antisemitism in all its forms.”
“Our senior leaders are working to stay focused on keeping the campus safe and functioning,” a spokesperson said.
Harvard did not immediately return a message seeking comment Wednesday.
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