Claudine Gay’s resignation had nothing to do with plagiarism | Moira Donegan

Her resignation is merely the latest episode in the right wing's assault on education - a project that has increased in its virulence in recent years

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.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist