Tell write from wrong

Demand Harvard defines text theft

An acclaimed African-American scholar who has accused Harvard’s outgoing president, Claudine Gay, of ripping off her work is demanding that the prestigious university’s board members clarify what exactly they consider as plagiarism, after they stood by the embattled academic.

Attorneys representing Carol Swain (inset above), a former political science professor at Vanderbilt University, sent a letter Wednesday to the Harvard Corporation, the school’s highest governing body, requesting to know what “remedies” the Ivy League institution seeks to make for the unauthorized use of her work.

“Through its acts, omissions, and public statements surrounding the use of Dr. Swain’s work, the Harvard Corporation is now invested in this matter and its subsequent outcome,” attorney Robert Kleinman wrote on behalf of Swain. “How many instances of duplicative language in a scholarly work would constitute plagiarism? Would five instances of duplicative language constitute plagiarism . . .? Would 50?”

The stern missive, dated Wednesday, also sought clarification on what constitutes “duplicative language” and when the line crosses over into plagiarism.

Gay has been accused of lifting passages from Swain’s Woodrow Wilson Prize-winning work “Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress” for her 1997 doctoral thesis. The board has said that a review uncovered three instances of “inadequate citation” on Gay’s part, but no misconduct.

“Have a sit down conversation with the people who have been harmed by the plagiarism of Gay and the system that protects her,” Swain posted last month on X, calling for Gay to be fired “posthaste.”

“Stop listening to the apologists for plagiarism,” she also wrote in the lengthy post titled “Some free unsolicited advice for Harvard University.”

“Stop listening to the racist mob of whites and blacks who cry racism while being among the worst offenders.

“Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard,” Swain wrote. “This harms academia as a whole, and it demeans Americans, of all races, who had to work for everything they earned.”