Claudine Gay’s resignation had nothing to do with plagiarism

‘Gay can be forced to resign for transparently dishonest reasons because universities like Harvard are dependent on bad-faith actors who wanted her gone to pursue their own agendas.’ Photograph: Ken Cedeno/Reuters

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.