Carol Swain: ‘Academic Standards Have Been Compromised’

Professor and writer Carol Swain is speaking out on the crisis of antisemitism, dishonesty, and lowered standards in American universities.

Swain, an outspoken critic of leftist ideology in education, has a new book focusing on the scandals that ousted former Harvard University president Claudine Gay and how Gay’s behavior is emblematic of a much larger problem.

On March 24, Swain tweeted, “Once a beacon of academic excellence, Harvard now faces backlash over campus antisemitism and allegations of plagiarism involving a former university president.”

She has witnessed the academic degeneration firsthand. “As someone who has taught at Princeton, Duke, and Vanderbilt, I’ve seen firsthand how academic standards have been compromised. I was even a victim of plagiarism myself. In my book, The Gay Affair, Harvard, Plagiarism, and the Death of Academic Integrity, I sound the alarm on how higher education has been hijacked by the left, sacrificing integrity in the process.”

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Claudine Gay was the first black president of Harvard University, so naturally leftists were practically drooling over her. But then Harvard was overrun by a tide of antisemitism, sometimes even active violence and calls for genocide, following Hamas’s horrific Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israelis. After a mere six months as president, Gay was forced to resign in January 2024.

In fact, Gay’s resignation came less than a month after her humiliating and catastrophic testimony before Congress on what Swain calls “her university's laissez-faire approach to protecting Jews on campus from rising expressions of antisemitism that followed Hamas's terrorist attacks on Israel.” 

Flashback to when the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, claimed that calling for genocide of Jews didn’t violate school policy. Like this post if you’re glad Pres. Trump chose Rep. Stefanik as Ambassador to the UN!

— Jews Fight Back (@@JewsFightBack) Mar 24, 2025

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But pro-Hamas rioting on campus was not Gay’s only scandal. The “double whammy occurred when it was reported that Gay had committed serial plagiarism involving her 1997 PhD dissertation completed while a student at Harvard and in other published works.” Swain’s book summary explains:

Among those whose work Gay pilfered was Dr. Carol Swain, author of the ground-breaking 1993 book Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress. In The Gay Affair, Dr. Swain offers a candid, compelling narrative about Gay, Harvard, academic plagiarism, and how she (Swain) was rebuffed and threatened financially when she attempted to seek a legal remedy from Harvard officials. For an insider's look into the world of elite institutional academia and how corners often get cut, Swain's The Gay Affair is a no-nonsense must-read.

I have not yet personally read Swain’s book, so I do not know whether it is an excellent must read. But one thing is certainly true — Claudine Gay and all her woke, Marxist, DEI ilk are turning our once admired academic institutions into international laughingstocks, mere brainwashing propaganda entities rather than high-level educational institutions.

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