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--:-- John Bickley: The dual scandals of a double standard for anti-Semitism on campus and academic plagiarism have plagued Harvard this week, as the university's board chose not to remove President Claudine Gay. The controversial decision comes despite Gay's widely criticized congressional testimony and evidence that she improperly used other academic scholarship in her publications. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Carol Swain, whose work is among that scholarship used by the Harvard president.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, December 16th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the Harvard presidential scandal is Dr. Carol Swain, senior fellow for the Institute for Faith and Culture.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: Thank you.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, you were a tenured professor in the Ivy League, Princeton, and you've been very outspoken on this situation as your own work appears to have been plagiarized here. First, what do you make of the Harvard board unanimously deciding to support Claudine Gay after her congressional testimony and now allegations of plagiarism?
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: I see it as a low point for American higher education that Harvard University would try to redefine plagiarism so that it can retain its first ever Black president who was clearly promoted based on diversity, equity, and inclusion standards. And I would argue that her record, even if she had not plagiarized her articles, would not normally have supported tenure in the Ivy League.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And you say this as someone who was tenured early at Princeton and the standard in the Ivy League used to be that you had to have a major path-breaking publication.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: That's right. And the book that she lifted a couple of passages from, Black Faces, Black Interests, the Representation of African Americans in Congress, was a book that won three national prizes, including the highest prize a political scientist can win. It was cited by many law court decisions and the U.S. Supreme Court. And it was considered the seminal work in the area of minority representation and representation in Congress.
--:-- John Bickley: And even though she has one site of you in her bibliography, normally when you draw on the research of a leading scholar in a particular area, you have to engage that work. You have to let people know you know why you're asking the questions that you are.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: She didn't do that. She did not engage my work either to refute it, to affirm it, to acknowledge it. And I would argue that that harmed me in my career, even though I wasn't aware this was taking place, because in academia, your stature depends on how many times you are cited. If someone is in the area where you were the pathbreaker and they are not engaging your ideas, it has long-term consequences.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, you're one of several professors whose work was improperly used in Gay's writings, allegedly. University of Pittsburgh's George Reed Andrews has acknowledged that Gay did borrow a few of your phrases, as did UChicago economist Jens Ludwig. Both said they don't think it really rose to the level of plagiarism, but Ann Williamson of Miami University, Ohio, said it does look like plagiarism to her, and she actually said she was shocked by the passages Gay lifted from her work.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: I've looked at the sections from my own work and the articles that have pulled out passages and other people's work side by side. And I would argue that it is plagiarism and that a journalist would lose their job over it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And it's particularly troubling because it wasn't just her dissertation. It also included the published works that she presented for tenure. And you would encourage people to look at that senior thesis she wrote at Stanford. It won a prize. Her dissertation won a prize.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: Was the senior thesis plagiarized? That's where they need to look next.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The New York Post is now reporting that Harvard actually threatened them legally when a reporter reached out about these allegations back in October, which is surprising.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: Harvard has issued a statement addressing briefly the plagiarism charges. They said they did their own review and did find some instances that were problematic and are now requesting four corrections in two articles.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Is that an adequate response?
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: It's horrible. What they should do is if they want to keep her on their faculty, certainly she should make those corrections. But normally you don't get a do-over in life. Most people are held accountable. We all make mistakes. She made a mistake. And I believe that if they want to keep her on the faculty of Harvard, okay, just give her mercy, allow her to make the corrections, but she should not be the president of Harvard University with that record of plagiarism and the equal outcomes, the equity that we associate with neo-Marxism.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And DEI is like affirmative action on steroids. And that is what has advanced her and I believe what is keeping her in her position is that Harvard doesn't want to embarrass itself by firing its first-ever Black president. So they would rather hurt their brand than to get rid of a woman that should be fired. And she should have been fired already.
--:-- John Bickley: Some people say refusing to remove Gay was Harvard's way of sort of thumbing their nose at the Supreme Court's recent affirmative action decision against Harvard. What do you think about that?
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: Absolutely. And I was born in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board school desegregation case, where the Supreme Court ordered integration of public education in all deliberate speed. And the response in many places was massive resistance. And they resisted up until the late 1960s in Bedford County, Virginia, where I went to school. So I see the same thing happening is that just like the elites resisted the Brown versus Board of Education desegregation case, the elites at these institutions have decided that they're going to resist the Supreme Court's decision to end race-based discrimination.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, one question about the other issue at hand here, the double standard for anti-Semitism on campus. Is there a double standard?
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: If the protests and chants against Jews in Israel were taking place against blacks or even LGBT people, would Harvard and some of these other Ivy League schools have pointed to context as necessary to determine whether or not that was problematic?
--:-- Georgia Howe: If the Jewish students were Black, it wouldn't just be Harvard and the Ivy League, but all of America, every institution, the Biden administration, every government would have shut it down immediately. The police would have shut it down if it had been black students being harassed and being threatened by white students. And that is the double standard.
--:-- John Bickley: And you've been an advocate for viewpoint diversity in higher education. In fact, you just published a book that addresses this issue directly, The Adversity of Diversity, How the Supreme Court's Decision to Remove Race from College Admissions Criteria Will Doom Diversity Programs.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: That's right. And I can tell you that I am an advocate of education. I spent 28 years in academia. I took early retirement from Vanderbilt in 2017. You're pretty much in the heat of a controversy because of an opinion piece that I published criticizing Islam, created a firestorm, and I left academia.
--:-- Georgia Howe: But you saw the changes taking place, and it started right after President Obama was elected. You saw the critical race theory that had been mostly confined to certain departments of the university, that it started rapidly infecting every department.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: And I saw changes that made academia very uncomfortable for people like me. And I saw the decline of education to the point that they did not even give lip service to universities being marketplaces of ideas where you would have divergent voices allowed to speak. All of that started to die at American colleges and universities.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And as a consequence, these institutions have allowed themselves to become indoctrination centers. And if we want to educate young people, if we want strong leaders, if we want people that are qualified to take positions of responsibility in society, we have to expose them to divergent ideas.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: You cannot develop critical thinking skills unless you are sort of made uncomfortable, unless you hear new ideas. That's not taking place in the indoctrination centers we have today.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I also know that if you are conservative on a university campus, if you are deeply orthodox, whether it's Christian, Jewish, it's set up in such a way that if you don't fit in, the universities are very uncomfortable places. And so there are students who live in fear.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: There's no way you're going to get a quality education if you're so afraid you're going to offend someone. You can't ask questions. That's not what higher education should be about.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And so I believe that we have to make changes. And I also believe that changes are already happening. I've spoken this year at several universities, and I believe that universities are realizing that the value of the product that they're producing has declined to the point that many young people are deciding that they don't necessarily need or want a college education.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: And I have met parents who are very wealthy and grandparents who are telling me that the money they saved up for their offspring's education, that they're giving them an option. They can take the money and start a business or they can go to college.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, there's no doubt that the perception of universities has been shifting dramatically in recent years.
--:-- Dr. Carol Swain: Thank you so much for coming on.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Dr. Carol Swain, author of The Adversity of Diversity, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
