Carol M. Swain

Carol Miller Swain (born March 7, 1954) is an American political scientist and legal scholar who is a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University.

She is a frequent television analyst and has authored and edited several books.

Her interests include race relations, immigration, representation, evangelical politics, and the United States Constitution.

Carol Miller Swain was born on March 7, 1954, in Bedford, Virginia, the second of twelve children.

Her father dropped out of school in the third grade and her mother dropped out in high school.

Her stepfather used to physically abuse her mother, Dorothy Henderson, who is disabled due to polio.

Swain grew up in poverty, living in a shack without running water, and sharing two beds with her eleven siblings.

She did not finish high school, dropping out in ninth grade.

She moved to Roanoke with her family in the 1960s and appealed to a judge to be transferred to a foster home, which was denied.

Swain instead lived with her grandmother in a trailer park.

After she divorced in 1975, Swain earned a GED and worked as a cashier at McDonald's, a door-to-door salesperson, and an assistant in a retirement facility.

She later earned an associate degree from Virginia Western Community College.

She went on to earn a B.A., magna cum laude, in criminal justice from Roanoke College and a master's degree in political science from Virginia Tech.

She finished a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989.

Harvard University Press published her first academic book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress in 1993.

It received the D.B. Hardeman Prize and the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award.

Swain later accused deposed Harvard President Claudine Gay of plagiarizing portions of her book, stating, "Maybe she didn’t know any better, but it would qualify as plagiarism under Harvard’s own rules."

From 1999 to 2017, she taught political science and law at Vanderbilt University.

In 2000, she earned a Master of Legal Studies from Yale Law School.

Swain received tenure as an associate professor of politics and public policy at Princeton University.

While an undergraduate at Roanoke College, she organized a scholarship fund for black students that by 2002 had an endowment of $350,000.

Her third book, published in 2002, was The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration, which one reviewer described as "a gallant attempt to locate the middle ground of American values and social discourse toward resolving contemporary racial problems, however, complex social issues remain unresolved and out of focus".

Her methodology was criticized by political scientist Mark Q. Sawyer.

In 2003, she edited Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism with Russell K. Nieli.

The book contains telephone interviews with ten people active in the white nationalist movement, which were edited by the interviewees.

Stephanie Shanks-Meile, reviewing the book for Contemporary Sociology, criticized the book's methodology as "weak", and the choice of interviewees as "no real substitution for field research, making Swain and Nieli's ten telephone interviews… too superficial to base an entire study on white nationalism."

In 2011, Swain released Be the People: A Call to Reclaim America's Faith and Promise, published by Thomas Nelson.

Between October 2012 and July 2014 she hosted a weekly television talk show by the same name on WSMV-TV and WZTV.

Swain has participated in conferences and radio programs organized by the Family Research Council (FRC), the Tea Party movement, and The Heritage Foundation

Swain served on the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and was appointed by President George W. Bush to a National Council on the Humanities term ending January 26, 2014.

She also served on the Board of Trustees of her alma mater, Roanoke College, and is a foundation member of the Nu of Virginia Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

In November 2015, Vanderbilt University students started a petition asking university administrators to halt Swain's teaching and require her to attend diversity training sessions.

The students accused Swain of becoming "synonymous with bigotry, intolerance, and unprofessionalism".

Swain responded by calling the students "sad and pathetic, in the sense that they're college students and they should be open to hearing more than one viewpoint."

The petition garnered over 1,000 signatures within days, before changing to asking administrators to only suspend Swain and require all professors to attend diversity training.

In response, a pro-Swain petition was started by her supporters, who suggested the student petition was "reminiscent of China's Cultural Revolution, when student Red Guards made false and ridiculous accusations against their professors".

Nicholas S. Zeppos, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, issued a statement saying that while Swain's views are not the same as the university's, the university is committed to free speech and academic freedom.

She retired from her post at Vanderbilt in 2017.

In January 2017, Swain announced that she would retire from Vanderbilt in August, saying, "I will not miss what American universities have allowed themselves to become".

After a series of racial protests erupted in the summer of 2017, an article in The Weekly Standard dubbed Swain "the Cassandra of Vanderbilt".