Jerry Wragg

Carol Swain grew up in a shack without running water with 11 brothers and sisters. She was much feted in academia upon her emergence but quickly engaged in heterodoxies that got her blackballed and went on to become an evangelical Christian and a Trump supporter. That's why her outraged demands for accountability for Claudine Gay stealing her work carry no weight with anyone that matters. She lacked the implicit knowledge of how to stay within the right-thinking consensus that Gay learned at Exeter and therefore became a pariah while Gay made a rapid ascent to the very pinnacle of all academic leadership. Roland Fryer was abandoned by his mother early and his abusive father was convicted for rape, leaving him to fend for himself in the streets as a teenager. He righted himself and became the youngest tenured professor in the history of Harvard University, a favorite of the then-President of Harvard Lawrence Summers, and one of the most productive scholars at Harvard University, studying subjects seeking to find ways to ameliorate the condition of the black underclass. Soon after publishing a study demonstrating that police officers were slightly more likely to shoot white suspects than black subjects, he became the subject of a sexual harassment investigation. He ended up suspended for a year and the lab where he studied ways to ameliorate the condition of the black underclass was shuttered -- despite the fact that the female best friend of his accuser told investigators and went on the record with the press that his accuser was typically the instigator of the sexualized banter that occurred in Fryer's lab. The dean of Harvard College who delivered this punishment was -- Claudine Gay. Gay is the scioness of one of Haiti's wealthiest families and a graduate of Exeter. She obtained tenure at Stanford on the strength of four published papers, and was poached by Harvard. She has gone on to publish a total of eleven research papers and no books -- a record that a professor told me was easily in the bottom 5th percentile of all professors employed at peer institutions. Seven of those papers have been shown to have violated Harvard's rules on academic citation. All of these professors are beneficiaries of affirmative action -- Swain and Fryer overcame great adversity and disadvantage to do high level academic work that was generally regarded as of the first rank by their peers. They fulfilled the promise of that policy by taking opportunities granted to them on the basis of considerations beyond the strictly academic, given the diminished opportunities available to them in youth. Gay is a child of privilege who learned how to play the game among other elites -- she stole from Swain and shut down Fryer on her path to the presidency.