You will not be surprised to learn that this topic is in heavy rotation in conservative media (“Stefanik shreds Harvard over ‘complete moral failure’ after allowing Claudine Gay to remain president,” screams the headline on foxnews.com). Just like the hearing at which Stefanik put on such a passionately convincing performance of umbrage, the “plagiarism” issue is really about reinforcing the right-wing contempt for universities, one of the key institutions Republicans use as a foil and a target. To Republicans, Gay is just one more professor who should be held up as evidence that the left hates you and everything you believe in.
Some years ago, Rush Limbaugh laid out what he called “The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media.” Nothing that comes from any of those institutions, he told his audience many times over the years, should be believed. They should be attacked and discredited whenever possible. Keeping up those attacks helps conservatives construct an alternate reality; allows them to claim to be noble underdogs fighting against powerful and sinister institutions; and propagates the fiction that the “elite” whom ordinary people ought to despise is not those who hold economic power but a bunch of pointy-headed professors poisoning the minds of the country’s youth.
And that’s really the point of all this. In ordinary circumstances, questions about citations in a university president’s decades-old articles would be of interest only to fellow academics, not front-page news and fodder for cable network bloviating. The average citizen would neither know nor care who the president of Harvard is, let alone have an opinion on whether she should still be the president a month from now.