At first blush, the fury over Claudine Gay’s departure from the Harvard presidency over complaints about serial plagiarism looks like a classic left-right fracas.

On one side, there were far-right culture-warriors braying about “wokeism” and targeting yet another university. On the other, there were progressives recoiling at the racist tone of the campaign against the school’s first Black president.

And now that it’s over, we’re in a cycle of preening by conservative Beltway big shots celebrating the exit — and dire warnings from the left about who the triumphant mob might target next.

But there’s a strange thing missing from this moment of conservative agit-prop victory: The people who actually made decisions about Gay, who were almost all on the left and the center-left. In other words, exactly who you’d expect to be in the mix at a liberal university.

Rather than a monolith to be attacked by MAGA die-hards, elite higher ed is a world with significant existing tensions between the moderate and not-so-moderate left. Conservatives may have fanned the flames, but the divides that defined Gay’s tenure — over DEI, over Israel/Gaza, over speech and even over how seriously to take her plagiarism — were among folks well outside the far-right universe. As such, it’s a lesson for all sorts of other blue-state organizations, from think tanks to businesses to the Democratic Party.

Don’t take my word for it. Take it from Chris Rufo, the far-right critical race theory foe who DeSantis appointed to a state university board. Rufo, who helped publicize the plagiarism charges that ultimately doomed Gay, spent time this week taking credit for the media strategy that forced her out. But he actually laid out the strategy weeks ago:

“We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right,” Rufo wrote on December 19 on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”

That’s more or less what happened.

Revelations about Gay’s dubious citations began in far-right outlets — part of an ugly campaign that followed her disastrous appearance before Congress. It’s safe to say the campaign wasn’t motivated by any particular interest in Gay’s scholarly output. The hectoring from people like Harvard megadonor Bill Ackman appalled even critics of Gay’s leadership........

© Politico