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Claudine Gay resigned a year ago as president of Harvard University following criticism for her lackluster response to rampant campus antisemitism as well as numerous plagiarism allegations.

Harvard brass cleared her of what they called “research misconduct,” and she continues to work as a professor at the Ivy League institution despite nearly 50 allegations of plagiarism lodged against her.

But one scholar whose work was lifted by Gay refuses to go quietly into the night without a fight.

Former law Professor Carol Swain recently published her latest book “The Gay Affair:
Harvard, Plagiarism, and the Death of Academic Integrity,” which she said she hopes holds Harvard and Gay accountable for their actions.

“If Harvard gets away with this, it will impact every institution downstream as well as K-12 education,” she told The College Fix in a telephone interview last week.

“To me, Harvard redefined [plagiarism] as duplicative language without attribution,” she said. “The desire of these universities to have diversity has caused them to lower their standards.”

She said the goal of her book is to spur institutions to police themselves better, “because plagiarism is not a misdemeanor, it’s not a felony, it’s an ethical breach that has to be handled by the institutions who employ the people who engage in it.”

Swain is one of the most prominent conservative black scholars in the nation, a retired professor who was tenured at Vanderbilt and Princeton universities and has written numerous books.

But in 1993 she was a Democratic scholar simply climbing the ranks. At the time, she published “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress,” which went on to win awards and has been cited in two U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

It was that book that Gay lifted ideas and concepts from, writing her own dissertation that sought to serve as a refutation of Swain’s arguments — without actually citing Swain’s work.

“Most egregious was the audacity of my research to question the sacred claim that only black members of Congress could represent black people. There was a proper way to take me down. Claudine Gay should have acknowledged, challenged, and refuted my claims with her own original research,” Swain wrote in her book.

Swain contemplated filing a copyright infringement lawsuit in the months following the news, but said she had to back down because Harvard’s lawyers threatened to go scorched Earth on her.

“It is like David against Goliath, who is going to go up against someone who has a [$53.2 billion] endowment,” she told The Fix, adding that if she had lost, Harvard could have billed her for their attorneys fees, some of whom charge up to $1,000 an hour.

“As I would soon learn, copyright law does not protect one from the theft of ideas. Copyright law protects copyright holders. The sentences and passages pilfered from Black Faces, Black Interests, were described as de minimis (minimal) and old-fashioned plagiarism was reimagined by Harvard as being simply ‘duplicative language.’ Stolen words and sentences were described as fair use,” Swain wrote in her book.

Swain told The Fix: “I wanted to sue them and have it aired in court, but because I do not have deep pockets, the only way I could tell people about the seriousness of what took place was by writing the book.”

Gay and Harvard’s media relations team did not respond to a request from The College Fix seeking comment.

Swain said she has never received an apology from Gay or anyone at Harvard, but she did send President Alan Garber a signed copy of her book.

Editor’s note: This article has been amended to correct the size of Harvard’s endowment. 

MORE: Black scholar plagiarized by Harvard’s Gay sends legal demand letter: ‘unlawful copying’

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