Following condemnation for her weak response to widespread school hatred and many theft allegations, Claudia Gay resigned a year ago as chairman of Harvard University.
Despite roughly 50 accusations of plagiarism being made against her, Harvard officials cleared her of what they termed “research misconduct,” and she is still employed as a teacher at the Ivy League organization.
However, a professor whose work was lifted by Gay refuses to move unharmed into the night.
Carol Swain, a former law professor, just released her most recent 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.
In a phone interview last month, she told The College Fix,” If Harvard gets aside with this, it will have an impact on every organization river as well as K-12 education.”
” To me, Harvard redefined]plagiarism ] as duplicative language without attribution”, she said. These institutions have been lowering their standards because of their need for variety.
She claimed that the aim of her book is to encourage institutions to improve their internal controls, “because theft is not a criminal, it is an honest breach that must be handled by the organizations who employ the people who engage in it.”
As a retired professor with tenure at Vanderbilt and Princeton University and author of several books, Swain is one of the most well-known conventional black scholars in the country.
She was just a Democrat researcher in 1993, and she quickly rose. At the time, she published” Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress”, which went on to win prizes and has been cited in two U. S. Supreme Court decisions.
Gay wrote her own research that attempted to refute Swain’s arguments from that book without really citing Swain’s job. It was the book from which she borrowed ideas and concepts.
The most outrageous thing I found was how my research made the sacred claim that merely black members of Congress had represent black people. There was a right way to put me to sleep. Claudine Gay does had acknowledged, challenged, and refuted my says with her own unique research”, Swain wrote in her guide.
In the months that followed the media, Swain said she had been considering filing a trademark infringement lawsuit because Harvard’s attorneys had threatened to scorch Earth on her.
” It is like David against Goliath, who is going to go up against someone who has a$ 450 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.
” Copyright does not protect one from the fraud of ideas,” as I had soon discover. Rights buyers are protected by copyright laws. The words and lines pilfered from Black Faces, Black Interests, were described as de minimis ( little ) and conventional copying was reimagined by Harvard as being just’ duplicative vocabulary.’ In her book, Swain wrote that” taken words and sentences were characterized as good use.”
According to Swain,” I wanted to sue them and have it aired in court, but because I do not have deep pockets, the only way I may tell people about the severity of what took place was by writing the book.”
The media relations crew at Gay and Harvard did not respond to a request for comment from The College Fix.
Although she did not receive an explanation from Gay or people at Harvard, Swain did give a signed version of her book to President Alan Garber.
MORE: Black professor plagiarized by Harvard’s Gay sends constitutional requirement letter: ‘ unlawful reproducing’
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