Dr. Carol Swain, one of the academics whom it appears that current Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized in her academic papers, took to Elon Musk’s X to demand Harvard not just fire President Gay but reverse course on its DEI policies and hire the people individuals for the job instead, with its recent experiences showing just how bad a non-merit based policy can be.
The most important of the plagiarism allegations against Gay, as background, stem from her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation, with Gay not citing sources in numerous parts of her paper and in some cases appearing to try to pass off the work of others, such as Dr. Swain, as her own.
Taking to Twitter to demand that Harvard hold Gay accountable, Swain said, “I have some free unsolicited advice for Harvard University. 1. Stop listening to the apologists for plagiarism. 2. Fire Claudine Gay posthaste. She can be relieved of duties until the terms are negotiated.”
Continuing, she took a wrecking ball to the school’s DEI policies and demanded it focus on finding and recruiting the best talent rather than appeasing the woke mob, saying, “3. Stop listening to the racist mob of whites and blacks who cry racism while being among the worst offenders. 4. Hire the best man or woman who can steer the university back towards sanity. Appeasing the Marxist identity politics mob should not be a consideration. The person for the job might be a middle to older age white Jewish man who believes in classical liberalism.”
She then argued that it needs to sit down and reevaluate its policies and proceed by apologizing to and listening to those hurt by both Gay’s plagiarism and its crazy policies, saying, “5. Have a sit down conversation with the people who have been harmed by the plagiarism of Gay and the system that protects her. 6. Recognize that Harvard’s systematic racism and classism have far reaching effects. 7. Apologize to alumni, students, parents, and donors who have been harmed and embarrassed.”
Later, in response to a report that Gay is trying to go bact and “correct” her plagiarized dissertation, Swain said, “#Harvard has reached a new level of absurdness. No one should get a do over for a dissertation. It is being proposed because if Gay plagiarized parts of her dissertation, the question arises as whether she has earned a doctorate. Is she Dr. Gay or Ms. Gay?”
And, adding to that in a quote tweet, she said, “It has become Orwellian. I betcha $20 that the DEI Office at Harvard are behind the scenes directing the feces show. Where else would the nonsensical directives come from? Holding minorities to reasonable standards might have an adverse impact on them. 🙄”
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Swain also retweeted a post about her background and why the left hates her. It said, in part, “Carol Swain grew up in a shack without running water with 11 brothers and sisters. She was much feted in academia upon her emergence but quickly engaged in heterodoxies that got her blackballed and went on to become an evangelical Christian and a Trump supporter. That’s why her outraged demands for accountability for Claudine Gay stealing her work carry no weight with anyone that matters. She lacked the implicit knowledge of how to stay within the right-thinking consensus that Gay learned at Exeter and therefore became a pariah while Gay made a rapid ascent to the very pinnacle of all academic leadership.”
Featured image credit: By KevinWimpy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118197928