Claudine Gay’s resignation had nothing to do with plagiarism

Any political observer who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that the resignation of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University who was driven from her job this week, had nothing to do with plagiarism.

There are all sorts of factors that make this obvious: there is the reality that Gay’s field, political science, is a data-driven discipline in which abstracts from one paper are not-infrequently copied as parts of a literature review in another, and that the borrowed phrases and summaries that account for Gay’s “plagiarism” are not crimes of theft but of sloppiness, with little bearing on the originality of her work.

There is the fact that Gay’s “plagiarism” scandal arose belatedly, brought up in tenuous relation to a similarly fatuous and opportunistic false claim by the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik that Gay had abetted antisemitism at Harvard. (The same accusation also led to the ouster, last month, of the University of Pennsylvania president, M Elizabeth Magill).

There is the fact that rightwing propagandists, prominently the anti-education crusader Christopher Rufo, openly admitted the pretextual nature of their plagiarism smear against Gay, and frankly spoke of their intention to manipulate the national media into creating a baseless controversy that would drive Gay, Harvard’s first Black president and only the second woman to lead the university, out of her job.

But recounting all of this is tedious, and cedes the terms of the debate to the authors of this false controversy–fighting on their territory, arguing the questions they pose, giving good-faith rebuttals to allegations they do not pretend to believe even as they make them. As the sociologist Victor Ray