About this item
Highlights
- Claudine Gay's resignation on January 2, 2024, as Harvard University's first Black president, after only six months on the job, sent shock waves across the world.
- Author(s): Carol M Swain
- 132 Pages
- Political Science, Commentary & Opinion
Description
About the Book
Claudine Gay's resignation on January 2, 2024, as Harvard University's first Black president, after only six months on the job, sent shock waves across the world. However, it did not shock anyone closely following her situation. Gay stepped down less than a month after giving disastrous testimony in Congress about her university's laissez-faire approach to protecting Jews on campus from rising expressions of antisemitism that followed Hamas's terrorist attacks on Israel. A 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. 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.Book Synopsis
Claudine Gay's resignation on January 2, 2024, as Harvard University's first Black president, after only six months on the job, sent shock waves across the world. However, it did not shock anyone closely following her situation. Gay stepped down less than a month after giving disastrous testimony in Congress about her university's laissez-faire approach to protecting Jews on campus from rising expressions of antisemitism that followed Hamas's terrorist attacks on Israel. A 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.
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.
The Gay Affair is the 13th book Dr. Carol M. Swain has either authored or co-authored. In addition to Black Faces, Black Interests, her other notable works include The New White Nationalism in America, Be The People, Black Eye for America, and The Adversity of Diversity. Dr. Swain is a retired university professor who was tenured at Vanderbilt and Princeton Universities. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee.
Review Quotes
Book Life Review:
"Swain (author of The Adversity of Diversity, among other titles) takes aim at academic plagiarism at elite universities by telling the story of Harvard President Claudine Gay's resignation in early 2024-and Swain's personal history with the accusations of plagiarism facing Gay. As Swain frames it, Gay, Harvard's first Black president, rose through the ranks of academia with a label of "brilliant" that protected her work from scrutiny. Swain targets Harvard's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (the topic of Swain's outraged previous book) initiatives as essential to Gay's success. She also charges, with detailed line-by-line comparisons, Gay with having incorporated into her 1997 dissertation, without credit, language and ideas from Swain's book Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress, winner of the 1994 Woodrow Wilson prize for the year's best book on government, politics, or international affairs.
The Gay Affair blends Swain's presentation of her case with polemic elements-she argues that Gay is both "a victim and a beneficiary of a system that picks and chooses winners and losers"-plus consideration of untested areas of copyright law, a diagnosis of "plagiaritis" in academia and its causes, and the unfairness of students being held to a higher standard than professors). As in other recent books, Swain-a professor of law and political science who retired from Vanderbilt amid clashes over DEI initiatives and other topics with progressive students and administrators-offers both academic rigor and a spirit of pained aggrievement, but this time with a lighter touch: The Gay Affair is in many ways a victory lap."