Carol M. Swain

Carol Miller Swain (born March 7, 1954) is an American political scientist, professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, and former television host. She is the author or editor of six books. Her scholarly work has been cited by two Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her fields are race relations, immigration, representation, evangelical politics, and the US constitution. Her views on race and Islam have attracted national attention in the media.

Early life

Carol Miller Swain was born in Bedford, Virginia in 1954. Her father dropped out of school in the third grade and her mother dropped out in high school. Her stepfather used to beat up her mother, Dorothy Henderson, who is disabled due to infantile paralysis. Swain grew up in poverty, living in a shack without running water, and sharing two beds with her eleven siblings. The second of twelve children, she did not have shoes and thus missed school whenever it snowed. She did not attend 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.

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Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University (also known informally as Vandy) is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, founded in 1873. The university is named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the South. Vanderbilt hoped that his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War.

Today, Vanderbilt enrolls approximately 12,000 students from all 50 U.S. states and over 90 foreign countries in four undergraduate and six graduate and professional schools. Several research centers and institutes are affiliated with the university, including the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, Dyer Observatory, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the only Level I trauma center in Middle Tennessee. With the exception of the off-campus observatory and satellite medical clinics, all of the university's facilities are situated on its 330-acre (1.3 km²) campus in the heart of Nashville, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from downtown. Despite its urban surroundings, the campus itself is a national arboretum and features over 300 different species of trees and shrubs.