May 7, 2025 - The Truth Central - Dr. Jerome Corsi
46:39
Plagiarism in Academia: the Decline of Academic Integrity and Leadership with Dr. Carol Swain
Claudine Gay’s resignation on January 2, 2024, as Harvard University’s first Black president, after both her evasive answers to questions about antisemitism on the university's campus under her watch and an exposing of her plagiarism throughout her career.Dr. Carol Swain, one leading academic whose work Gay copied, talks with Dr. Jerome Corsi on The Truth Central about the prevalence of plagiarism, how it has been ignored in many cases and how university leadership has been tainted by not only the recent antisemitism allowance exposes, but what some might call an epidemic of these same leaders committing and getting away with plagiarism.Visit The Corsi Nation website: https://www.corsination.comIf you like what we are doing, please support our Sponsors:Get RX Meds Now: https://www.getrxmedsnow.comMyVitalC https://www.thetruthcentral.com/myvitalc-ess60-in-organic-olive-oil/Swiss America: https://www.swissamerica.com/offer/CorsiRMP.phpGet Dr. Corsi's new book, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis: Forensic Analysis of the JFK Autopsy X-Rays Proves Two Headshots from the Right Front and One from the Rear, here: https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-President-John-Kennedy-Headshots/dp/B0CXLN1PX1/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20W8UDU55IGJJ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ymVX8y9V--_ztRoswluApKEN-WlqxoqrowcQP34CE3HdXRudvQJnTLmYKMMfv0gMYwaTTk_Ne3ssid8YroEAFg.e8i1TLonh9QRzDTIJSmDqJHrmMTVKBhCL7iTARroSzQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=jerome+r.+corsi+%2B+jfk&qid=1710126183&sprefix=%2Caps%2C275&sr=8-1Join Dr. Jerome Corsi on Substack: https://jeromecorsiphd.substack.com/Visit The Truth Central website: https://www.thetruthcentral.comGet 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: 800-519-6268Follow Dr. Jerome Corsi on X: @corsijerome1Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/corsi-nation--5810661/support.
This is Dr. Jerome Corsi and we have a special guest with us today.
We've got Dr. Carol Swain.
Dr. Swain, how are you today?
I am doing great and thank you so much for having me on.
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 Claudine Gay was the president of Harvard, 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 of her doctoral dissertation.
And one of the people that she plagiarized from the most was Dr. Swain.
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 Dr. Swain this week,
right after President Trump has been Re-elected and now has been re-inaugurated as president and has, in fact, 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 Dr. Swain on to explain her book and what happened to her and what she learned from all this, which is going to be fascinating.
Dr. Swain, welcome, and congratulations on the publication of your book.
I'd like to point out, too, that the release date was January 2, 2025, which is the anniversary of Claudine Gay's resignation from Harvard.
That's interesting.
Was that coincidental, or were you able to erase it?
It was done deliberately.
Deliberately.
Okay.
Well, touche.
How did you find out that, um, uh, Claudine Gay had plagiarized your work.
I received a phone call from Dr. Art Laffer on December 10, 2023.
And it was a Sunday evening, probably around 8. And I'm friends with Art Laffer, but we're not friends like...
Jerome, I don't expect you to call me Sunday evening.
Right.
But when the phone rang...
He asked me if I had heard about the president of Harvard University that she had been accused of pleasurizing her dissertation.
And he said, and guess who she pleasurized?
You.
That must have been a shock to you to hear that.
It was a shock because it occurred 26 years ago.
And I was just finding out about it.
And then the phone started to rang.
Dr. Laffer encouraged me to go to Chris Ruffo's ex-person 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 plagiarism.
And I 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 troubled.
But then when Harvard 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 work my way through it.
I calmed down totally.
And then January 2nd, 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.
I contacted that attorney and I told him that he could send his demand letter to Harvard.
Right.
And the work that she plagiarized, what was the work of yours that was plagiarized?
It's my first book, Black Faces, Black Interests, The Representation of African Americans in Congress, published in 1993, updated in 1995.
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 the U.S. Congress represent African American interests?
And that book won three national prizes, including the highest prize a political scientist can win.
At the time, there was the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Prize.
The name has been changed because Woodrow Wilson is no longer...
He's politically incorrect.
And it won the D.B. Hardeman Award for Best Book on Congress and shared the B.O. Key Award for Best Book on Southern Politics.
And so the book was a splash, and its biggest contribution was that it identified a tradeoff between descriptive representation, having more people in office who look like you, and substantive representation, having people who support your agenda.
And I argued 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 I went where my research took me, and I can tell you, Jerome, that people would come up to me and say, You know, 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 the U.S. Supreme Court.
Establishes that what a person believes is more important than their political party, if I'm hearing you correctly.
In other words, explain how the party and the person's belief interact.
Those two variables, as it were.
The trade-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 drawing majority Black legislative districts.
The argument was that the districts had to be 65% Black or greater.
I questioned that.
And I also made 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 I made the case for substantive representation, people who can actually get out there and support your agenda.
And it wasn't just roll call 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 interest.
And I chose districts.
I looked at white representatives of majority Black districts, Black representatives of Black districts, Black and white representatives of mixed districts.
And the book, for some people, was controversial because it disagreed with those who argued that only Blacks could represent Black interests.
And so with Claudine Gay, there was some verbatim.
They're words and sentences, but the idea, 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 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 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.
But she was arguing essentially that Claudine 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.
Yes.
But what she did was use my work as a straw man for her work.
Without attribution to you, without arguing that you had, quote, posited the other side of the argument.
Yeah.
In other words, it was intellectually dishonest.
In other words, had she say, okay, Dr. Swain has written this book, and here are her conclusions, and it represented fairly what you had done.
And then she on her own said, here's why I disagree, and here's my evidence and arguments as to why I disagree.
That would have been honest and legitimate.
Correct?
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 been drawn 65% Black or greater.
And my book, one of the reasons that it made such an impact was that I argued that...
That it was not the right strategy to draw the overwhelmingly Black districts, that they were not needed because whites would support Blacks, and that 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 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 taxi cab.
I wrote a Congressional Quarterly article that the Blacks would be reelected because of the incumbency advantage.
And so, I mean, I just did good political science, and I was right.
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 race is a critical determinant of what somebody's 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 legislature and legislation and public policy.
And what you're saying is basically that...
Right whites can and do support Black people, understood on the basis that we're all human beings, that race is inconsequential.
Well, let me tell you that this book, again, was published in 1993, 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, 40% of the Blacks in Congress were being elected from districts that were not majority Black on Election Day.
Because 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 problem with race, that they probably had gone elsewhere, that that was not going to be a huge detriment to Blacks getting elected in the 1990s.
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, I argue that there's no way that Claudine Gay's dissertation committee was not aware of my work.
And 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 cancel culture, we labeled it a few years ago, but it's been going on for a long time.
And I don't think it's uncommon for progressives to not cite the work of people that they deem 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.
Right, but your argument had political consequences.
Yes, it did.
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 the kind of person that could be promoted to be president of Harvard based on her leftist ideological orientation and her attractiveness as a person.
And so therefore, when they refuted your arguments, They didn't even give you the acknowledgement that you existed.
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 didn't want you to be seen.
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 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 sort of stopped 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, and so it was 26 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 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 the right pedigree.
She was from Phillips Exeter Academy, undergrad education, Princeton and Stanford, PhD, Harvard.
And she just was perfect for the narrative.
And I believe that she was pushed and that the progressives did not care because I was not important enough.
And also, they didn't want to acknowledge you, so few would go and actually seek you out and read what you had written.
Had 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 you were already cancelled while in the process of being plagiarized and refuted.
Well, you know something, the journalist that I discuss in the book who uncovered the plagiarism, apparently the rumors had been circulating for years, and Dr., I mean, I'm not, Claudine Gay.
She cited some of the derivative work of scholars and she plagiarized some of those people who 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.
Well, she was a picked rising star.
She had the right qualifications, starting with that she was woke and intellectually Aligned with the values that this hard left wanted to promote.
So she was picked for that she fit their narrative.
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.
You know, only blacks can 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 side of the race card that you want to play, and there are 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, his whole position was we want equal opportunity.
We don't want special privileges.
We don't want 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 the other way in saying, no, only blacks can understand blacks.
Only blacks can determine the agenda.
And, you know, my research question that sort of started my, the idea for the dissertation came from all these articles I was reading that made the case that Black representation would soon end because there were only two majority Black districts represented by white people, Lindy Boggs in Louisiana, Peter Rodino 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 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 $11,000 in the late 1980s, which was a lot of money for a student.
And 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 as well.
Yes, and it's wherever books are sold, but it's always easy for people to go to Amazon sometimes.
And there's the Amazon listing.
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 a landslide to Donald Trump in 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.
And I don't think it had to do with race as much as it had to do with her radical leftist orientation, woke nature.
And she was just a terrible candidate with a very undistinguished, indistinguished background.
And in that background, you revealed it included plagiarism, correct?
Yes, and also in the book, I talk about plagiaritis, that there's a pandemic affecting higher education.
And so the book is not just about Claudine Gay.
It discusses other high-profile plagiarists.
And the fact that there is no accountability.
And yes, Kamala Harris was exposed during 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 afoot among the left to redefine plagiarism.
Harvard tried to do it when they called...
Claudine Gay's actions, duplicative language without attribution.
And I think it's very dangerous for higher education because it sends the wrong signal to lesser institutions.
And also through K-12 education, there are teachers out there trying to drill in their students proper ways to do research with integrity.
Meanwhile, you have our leaders cutting corners.
Well, if you can, your book, 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 read it and look at it, is that essentially the academic enterprise has become politicized.
And so therefore, as long as you're...
Conclusions are sufficiently to the radical left, neo-Marxist or cultural Maoist or critical race theory, critical gender theory.
It doesn't matter that you follow the rules of not being a plagiarist, of proper attribution of sources, of direct quotations, being representative of direct quotations.
I mean, fundamentally, the radical left...
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 conservative, unless you're well-connected, you can get on Fox on a regular basis or Newsmax.
For the most part, the left will not give conservative scholars the same attention.
And with my book, Black Faces, 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 I became more conservative, it's been a lot harder to get exposure for ideas that cut against the grain.
Right, because 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 think it becomes schizophrenic in that whatever your particular orientation is, as long as you're...
Radical left, even if it's schizophrenic in terms of your identification as a person or sexually or any other way, that's got to be celebrated by everybody.
Well, I mean, things are changing, and I don't know how it will 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 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.
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.
Well, that's right.
I mean, you know, you can see it all over Joe Biden making, you know, essentially engaging in bribery.
With Ukraine, with China, with Russia selling political favors for personal gain.
And here's Donald Trump, 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 appeal.
And yet, it's because of his political orientation.
Which is America first in traditional values.
He's going to try to destroy the woke agenda.
Right.
He's persecuted.
And those on 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?
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 a law professor friend of mine who really used an analogy that caught my attention.
He talked about Hamas attacking Israel and how...
As a consequence, 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.
He was afraid that if I pursued it and lost, and he pointed out to me in a way my lawyers hadn't, that under copyright law, loser pays that I could end up having to pay for Harvard's lawyers as well as my own.
I had already been told that it would cost between $100,000 to $250,000 just to go to trial.
And so at the last minute, after we had, letters had gone back and forth, and 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 have the side-by-side of Claudine Gay's work and my work and the complaint so 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, 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'm at retirement age.
There was too much risk for me financially to go forward.
And so the book, The Gay Affair...
Harvard Pleasureism 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 there are problems with copyright law when it comes to academia and that maybe changes need to be made in copyright law itself.
Pleasureism itself is not a misdemeanor.
It's not a felony.
It has to be policed by institutions.
And institutions of higher education have to decide, are they going to be in the business of education or politics?
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?
Well, she landed on her feet.
She was able to keep, I don't know for how long, her $900,000 a year salary that she had.
$900,000 a year.
Almost a million dollar salary.
And this past fall, she taught a course on Yeah, whether she discussed plagiarism at all or whether she had any rules of what you should do in academic discourse.
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 47 identified instances of duplicative language without attribution involving a number of people.
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 not have written the book.
But the whole idea that they would just totally ignore me adds insult to injury.
Right.
And the whole corruption.
My PhD is from Harvard.
So I was at Harvard.
I graduated, got my PhD in 1972.
Now, Harvard of 2025 is very different than Harvard of 1972, but it was already beginning.
I mean, the leftist control of 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 in 1968, which just...
And just in the months before the takeover of University Hall by the students in a protest, same time when Columbia University was being taken over by the students, the administrative building in Columbia University and universities around the country in protest 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 was moving far left of Martin Luther King, who was, by the way, I know.
And not a Democrat.
And the whole nature of the debate, which has become radicalized towards race and...
Not followed the path that Martin Luther King had wanted it to follow.
Ironically, I think has entered 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 1950s.
I was very aware of it in the 1950s.
I would fly into Washington National.
I spent a lot of time in Washington even as a kid with my 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 this just isn't right.
I mean, it just had a, you know, 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 illegitimate unless you're a person of color.
I agree.
And in 2023, I published another book, The Adversity of Diversity.
And 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 2023 and pretty much totally ignored.
I got it right.
And in that book, pretty much I say that we got it right in the 1960s when we passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It was closer to the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, and that Americans, they don't have a problem.
We want non-discrimination, equal opportunity, 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 So,
Dr. Swain, I think your book is really about the death of the academic integrity, and it's making some very important statements about the nature of racial relations in the United States, because I think we're seeing now the...
End of DEI, certainly with Donald Trump and the Supreme Court moving towards saying that racial preferences are inherently suspect, which means that the original Martin Luther King idea of racial equality, equal opportunity, is being revisited and reinstated.
I think that's really 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.
There's blacks who have excelled in every area you can think of of endeavor.
What is fundamental in human condition is the ability to raise children and return to God and have families and develop a culture that is based upon learning.
And respect for God and honest values.
And I think you would agree with that.
I would agree with it.
And I would also point out that it's been about 60 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 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 ways of doing things...
Had to change, or had 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 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 lowering of standards.
In the preface of the book, I talk about Born and Bach.
They wrote a book in 1998, 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 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.
Well, I think that merit is the fundamental issue in all human endeavor.
I think it's one, again, that the left has opposed.
It's given Participation awards in sports instead of winners and losers.
It's done all kinds of things that try to emphasize that who you are should determine the result, not whether 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 the, you know, the airplane seizes 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 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 just something that Claudine Gay and Black scholars have engaged in.
There are plenty of high-profile white people that have also engaged in it.
And some of the ones that were charged with pleasurism, Doris Kearns, 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 plagiarism, especially when it involves people that they value.
Universities have got to be for academic integrity.
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 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 a truly gifted and qualified management should be able to produce.
And so I think we're realizing that the lowering of standards is a very bad idea.
And so therefore, we may be going through a, 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 right now?
Well, I took early retirement from Vanderbilt in 2017, 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 for a Christian conservative.
And so pretty much I could not afford to take Harvard on.
With Harvard having a $53 billion 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 people that are among the Harvard alumni like you or the administrators or people who are committed to higher education who will begin to change the culture.
on campuses.
It's important for institutions of higher learning to police themselves.
levels.
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 and your work has been excellent.
I think your scholarship is superior.
And your thinking has always been outstanding and challenging.
And this book deserves to be widely read.
So, Dr. Swain, thank you for joining us, and good luck with this book.
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 Dr. Carol Swain, and it's available in bookstores, it's available on Amazon, in a paperback, and in an audiobook version.
And Dr. 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 saying, 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.
