The Tennessee Star obtained the letter written by an attorney representing Dr. Carol M. Swain, sent on Wednesday to the Harvard Corporation, including Interim President Alan Garber and Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker, demanding answers about what Swain claims is plagiarism of her work by outgoing President Claudine Gay.
The letter revealed Swain requires answers about what Harvard considers “duplicative language,” which is what the university has acknowledged Gay committed in several of her academic works.
Writer and activist Christopher Rufo in December raised allegations that the former Harvard president plagiarized material from Swain’s work for her 1997 Ph.D. thesis. Swain is a former political science professor at Vanderbilt and a graduate of both the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Yale University.
Swain expects Harvard explain the difference between “duplicative language” and “verbatim copying” without attribution, whether the institution requires quotation marks to be used for “the identical replication of another author’s language,” and when it is appropriate to retroactively edit an academic text to include quotation marks around another author’s language.
In the letter, the lawyers wrote that Swain also demands Harvard declare whether Gay’s dissertation, which Swain alleges included material plagiarized from her book Black Faces, Black Interests, meets the Harvard University Guidelines for PhD Dissertation from 1997.
“How many instances of duplicative language in a scholarly work would constitute plagiarism?” The attorneys queried, “Would five instances of duplicative language constitute plagiarism? Would 50?”
Swain also asked through her attorney for Harvard to clarify whether “the discovery of plagiarism in a dissertation after a Harvard degree has been awarded” would “impact the status or validity of the degree conferred?”
The letter gave the Harvard Corporation until January 8, 2024 to respond.
During a December 19 appearance on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy, Swain called for Gay’s resignation, and told told Leahy that she was forcing Harvard to “stand behind something that is inexcusable.”
Swain also alluded to Harvard’s prior legal threat to The New York Post when the newspaper reported about Gay’s alleged plagiarism, declaring, “I don’t care about their lawyers. I care about justice and fairness, and I’m not fighting for myself. I’m fighting for American education.”
Gay resigned from her role on Tuesday, making her tenure as the university’s president the shortest in Harvard’s history.
Read the letter:
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Georgia Star News, The Virginia Star, and the Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Nothing will come of this. After all it is black on black crime so the mainstream media is not interested in reporting this story.
You go! Dr. Swain…Dr. Gay’s response on genocide against Jews was enough to fire her. Dr. Gay needs to go. Harvard should be embarrassed, but they are not.
Plagiarism by a student did what Claudine did it would mean expulsion, no exceptions. That the plagiarized document was foundation for her thesis then the thesis must be rejected. In other words, she has not completed all requisites for a doctorate level degree. Allowing her to resubmit with corrections the same document is unprecedented. She clearly looked the part of an idiot in her congressional testimony and for that, losing the university presidency was appropriate. Back to her qualifications, devoid the doctorate degree she is not qualified to be a professor. This a complete woke whitewash driven to deceive those both in and outside the university. Ted Kennedy, as I recall, was also expelled from Harvard for the same but did earn his law degree elsewhere.
If Claudine Gay got her diploma, on the copy and paste job, of the work of another person, that diploma should be revoked. Also, she should no longer be employed or affiliated, in any way, with the college. Colleges are suppose to be institutes of “higher learning”, not examples of cheating by plagiarism.
What are other students suppose to do when it come time to hand in their work? Cheat, copy and paste?