Dr. Carol Swain is a renowned author on the intersection of race and politics in the United States. Swain is a retired professor from Vanderbilt University, and she frequently appears on Fox News, Newsmax, and other platforms to inform the public on topics such as Critical Race Theory and school choice.

I spoke with Swain at her Tennessee office on her upbringing, how she became conservative later in life, and the state of free speech on college campuses. Swain grew up in poverty and worked her way into the academic world, where she taught from a liberal perspective for many years. In the interview, she discusses how the growing intensity of the progressive movement changed her point of view on American history and politics.

Note: this interview has been edited for grammar, length, and clarity. 

Cameron Arcand: Can you share a little bit about your background, how that shaped your conservative viewpoints, and how you got to where you are now?

Dr. Carol Swain: I’d say, unlike most people that I have encountered in academia, I come from a non-traditional background. I was born in the rural South, southwestern Virginia, in the country. I started my life in a two-room shack with no indoor plumbing and a kind of poverty that was worse than the poverty that I saw around me. During the era when I was a child, the schools were segregated. So, this is Bedford County, Virginia. I was born in ’54. That was the year of the Brown V. Brown of Education Supreme Court decision [on] desegregating schools.

But, part of that decision said that the schools would be desegregated with all deliberate speed, which meant each locality could decide how fast they could move. Virginia was one of the states that led the massive resistance to integration, and it was the late 1960s before our schools integrated. So, I would say that, maybe, the schools in Virginia where I lived may have integrated in ’67. 

I would have probably been in the fourth or fifth grade when the schools first integrated. As part of my childhood, I would say that at the predominantly black schools I got a good education, even though the teachers tried to prepare us for integration. They told us that the white students had newer books, and for some reason, I had the impression that white people were smarter than black people or that I would be behind, that I could be smart in the black school; but when we integrated, I wouldn’t be. And much to my surprise, I learned that I was smart at the predominantly white school, as well as the black school–that it had nothing to do with race–and that I was prepared.

I dropped out after the eighth grade, but I started missing a lot of school before. I never saw college as an option, because I believed that you had to be rich to go to college. I didn’t know anything about scholarships. Maybe because I dropped out at such a low-grade level, I did not have a guidance counselor or anyone to tell me that college was a possibility.

CA: But that education background, and then you bring that into today’s context. There’s this huge debate right now about school choice and where students can go to school in different communities.

CS: There was no school choice when I was a child. People like me went to public schools, and I would say that the public schools at that time were very focused on education. The math, the reading, the English, the science. I don’t believe that there were any efforts at indoctrination, but there were some politics involved in what was taking place. I remember that when the schools integrated, I had a teacher who was giving the class the belief that relief was coming, because George Wallace was running for president. I was pushing back, in a way, that you would almost say I was militant because I love James Brown said, “Say it loud, I’m black and proud.” That spoke to me. And I remember drawing a Wanted: Dead or Alive poster of George Wallace and nailing it to a tree. So that when the school bus came to pick us up, they would see the wanted poster of George Wallace.

But I can tell you what the teachers did. They were very patriotic, in the sense that we always did the pledge of allegiance, and sometimes I led the pledge. So, we put one hand over our heart and held our hand up like this towards the flag. I guess that’s not done very often, but that’s the way we did it.

I was so proud to be an American and I was not aware. I knew that the Civil Rights Movement was happening, that change was in the air. I guess I felt like we were getting the upper hand. But, I believed in America. I believed that police officers protected us. I knew the Civil Rights Movement was taking place, but I lived in the country. Then, when I moved to the city, the city that I moved to never had a riot. I was so disappointed because I wanted to participate in one. So, we didn’t have school choice. I’m a big advocate for school choice today, because the quality of public education from when I was a child has so eroded.

CA: And why do you think that is?

CS: Well, I would say that the world went to hell in a handbasket during the 1960s. I wasn’t aware of much of what was taken as taken place as a child, other than the unrest that I watched on TV. It’s so interesting because even amid that poverty, you know, we got electricity and we had a TV. So, that two-room shack had a TV. I remember a comedian telling a joke; he said that that there was this family, [who was] so poor that the baby had to sleep in the box the TV came in. So, that was part of my 1960s experience.

CA: You spent a lot of time as a professor and you just mentioned the Sixties. So, I think about that era and how that shaped academia, and this almost natural disposition that leftism is progress. What were certain things that you observed as a professor?

CS: I absorbed that academic world and I was a part of it and I taught lies as part of the indoctrination. Yeah, I was indoctrinated, too.

[I] just naturally assumed that with the Democrats[…] I believed the big switch, and that the Democrats were the party that cared about people like me. It escaped me, until maybe 15 or 20 years ago, to look at Virginia’s history and the Byrd machine that was oppressing blacks and shut down the school system in Prince Edward County for, I believe, 10 years, rather than to integrate. Those were Democrats. And in 1969 in Virginia, the first Republican Gov. Linwood Holton made news at the time.

I didn’t know about it. It escaped me because I was trying to survive in those years, but he took his two small children by the hand and walked them into the public schools in Richmond and integrated the schools. The true story of the political parties was the opposite of what I believe. And then law and order, how they say that when Nixon ran on law and order that that was racist. I read these books, I assigned students books because I accepted these ideas.

CA: Now, when we see what’s happening on college campuses today, where it’s very common for students to get canceled for having different political viewpoints, we’ll see [one] of two responses from an administration, either fully taking the side of the mob that wants that student either ousted or their voice silenced, or they’re very passive about it. They try to stay out of it. But at the end of the day, that student who just wanted to share a differing opinion almost never wins the game unless it’s a legal battle.

CS: Professors don’t either. When I ended up leaving academia, for one thing, I would say that the turning point for academia becoming intolerable was after President Obama was elected. Because that was when those Marxist ideas just got on steroids. And when you think of restorative justice, they applied it to education. They applied it to the criminal justice system. I found that professors were targeted and the year that I had… It was 2015, I published a controversial opinion piece criticizing Islam. What the university did, and what universities do, is they issued a press release that Professor Carol Swain didn’t represent Vanderbilt and that Vanderbilt stood for free speech. They must have sent it out five or six times.

Every time, I would give an interview or something, they would distance themselves from me. And so, I was never under pressure to resign. I made my own decision to take early retirement, but the year that the mob came for me, it also came for four other tenured full professors. I mean, the left, wasn’t going for the low-hanging fruit of the untenured professor, because those were easy to get rid of. They went for the full professors. I have often said that I was treated like an old white man.

I had no value because I was not a part of the women’s studies program, and I was not a part of Afro-American studies. I had no value to them as an individual, and I’ve always been an individualist. That’s how I think academia is now, that the only value that you have as…even an LGBT person…even a gay person, has no value to the institution if they’re conservative, if they’re not a part of Queer Studies and they’re not pushing themselves in that way, then they would be canceled in the same way. You’re either with the mob or you’re not.

CA: If you could offer some words of encouragement to conservative students and professors who are finding themselves in these situations, what would you say to them?

CS: That they have more allies on campus than they know. One of the things that I found was that there were so many people, and some of them were even minority students or people in those groups. They said that they supported me. And other Christians, you know, there were very few Christians, unless they were retirement age, that would actually stand up. That bothered me at one time. It doesn’t bother me now, because I think you need people like me and you also need the quiet types. But I think that there are more of us than there are of them.

There’s a biblical Scripture about that with Elijah, that [you] don’t assume that you are alone. I think that we must always operate on principles, and there are principles that relate to the Constitution, and that relates to Judeo-Christian values. The strongest position always is the principled position.

When I’m dealing with CRT and diversity, equity, and inclusion, I stand on the principles and I stand on the law. The very idea that some people think it’s acceptable to do to white people because, “All white people are privileged, even if they grew up in Appalachia. And, you know, the parents never finished the third grade, and they’ve lived in the same holler for generations.”

Somehow, that white person is more privileged than the offspring of the most elite black person. I know that to be a lie. We have to stand on the equal protection clause of the Constitution. In the end, I think truth, principles, and values will win out over this moment that we are living through right now. I think that there is more, there’s more support among the political left. I’m talking about classical liberals. There are liberals on campus that believe in free speech and are not happy with what is taking place.

And they don’t know when they’re going to be canceled because the mob, you know, went after the conservatives first, but now they eat their own. We as a nation would be better off with universities returning to places where you have the illusion, at least, of a marketplace of ideas, where they have some diversity, even if it’s token diversity. Education cannot take place unless you have opposing ideas for students to grapple with.