Gay Affair

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.