One of the academics accusing Harvard president Claudine Gay of copying her work has blasted the Ivy League school for redefining plagiarism by standing by her — claiming she was only saved because she’s “its first black president.”
Carol Swain, a former political science professor at Vanderbilt University, spoke out hours after Harvard said it was standing by the embattled president — even while conceding some of her academic work needed correcting after an investigation into the plagiarism claims.
“I feel like her whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work,” Swain told Fox News Digital of allegations Gay lifted some without proper attribution.
“My blood pressure is rising today because of Harvard’s decision that what she did doesn’t constitute plagiarism, and it doesn’t rise to the level of her removal,” she said.
“My message to Harvard is: You don’t get to redefine what is plagiarism. Most of us know what plagiarism is,” she said.
“It is an insult to intelligence what Harvard University has done,” she said of the outrage also involving Gay’s congressional testimony on antisemitism at the school.
Harvard Corporation’s decision to stand by the embattled president “is very demeaning to every person, not just racial and ethnic minorities, but anyone who has worked in school, who’s written papers, who’s tried to follow the guidelines,” she complained.
Swain suggested Gay is “getting a free pass” because she was the product of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, echoing claims made by hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman.
“Obviously, the Harvard Corporation did not have the courage to fire its first black president, someone who should never have been elevated in the first place,” said Swain, who is also black.
“They have decided they would rather lower standards for everyone rather than to hold her — who attended the most, you know, elite schools in America — to the same standards that average Americans are held to.”
Harvard should “apply the same standards to [Gay] as they would apply to a white person under the same circumstances,” Swain also told City Journal.
“A white male would probably already be gone,” she claimed.
Swain still hopes that Gay will “step down” from her position, following in the footsteps of former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill who lost her job in the scandal after their congressional testimony about antisemitism and calls for genocide.
“I hope that the pressure doesn’t relent until she does that because she’s harming academia, she’s harming black people,” said Swain.
Gay is accused of lifting other scholars’ works in her 1997 Ph.D. thesis and writing four papers published between 1993 and 2017 that did not have proper attribution, the Washington Free Beacon found.
The outlet said scholars it had consulted agreed Gay had “violated a core principle of academic integrity” and said they had found 10 instances where Gay had lifted sentences or paragraphs and only changed a word or two.
In its statement on Tuesday, the Harvard Corporation — the Ivy League’s highest governing body — said officials became aware of claims of plagiarism in late October and initiated an independent review.
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“On Dec. 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation.
“While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
The revelations of Gay’s alleged plagiarism came as the university leader was already under fire following a disastrous congressional hearing last week in which she stopped short of denouncing Harvard students calling for “global intifada” on freedom of speech grounds.
“We embrace a commitment to free expression – even views that are objectionable, offensive [and] hateful,” Gay said last week. “It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying and harassment. That speech did not cross that barrier.”
In the ensuing firestorm, a bipartisan group of congressmen introduced a resolution calling for Gay to resign from her position.
New York Rep. Elise Stefanik authored the resolution, which “strongly condemns the rise of antisemitism on university campuses around the country” and Magill, Gay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth for their “failure to clearly state that the calls for the genocide of Jews constitute harassment and violate their institutions’ codes of conduct.”
The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the resolution — which also calls for the ouster of Kornbluth from MIT — this week, according to the Harvard Crimson.
“This is not a partisan issue, but a question 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 was “not a hard question — in fact, it was probably the easiest question.
“The abject failure of these presidents to defend even the most basic of human rights — the right to exist — against hypothetical wokeism exposed the moral bankruptcy of these elite universities to the world,” Scalise said in a statement.
Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, of Florida, also called Stefanik’s query a “softball question.”
“That’s not a trick question, and it’s infuriating that these leaders of young people would try to equivocate with some nonsense about ‘it depends on the context.’
“Sub out ‘Jews’ for any other persecuted minority group and they would never have given that answer,” he argued, saying the university leaders “failed the test, and just like their students, there are no makeups.”
MIT has repeatedly stood by Kornbluth, telling The Post on Wednesday that the school and its president “reject antisemitism in all its form.”
“Our senior leaders are working to stay focused on keeping campus safe and functioning,” a spokesperson said.
Harvard did not immediately return a message seeking comment Wednesday.
