Until this week, the chatter about corruption in colleges revolved around massive amounts of money that drove a rejigging of athletic conferences. Then, a second discontent cropped up.

Put it under the heading of “Be careful what you say.”

It came to a head (or did it?) on Tuesday when Dr. Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University. She was impaled on two spikes, both at least partly of her own making.

First, in testimony on Dec. 5 before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, Gay couldn’t or wouldn’t say that advocating genocide of Jews, as some Harvard student groups had done, violates Harvard’s policies.

Second, she was accused of plagiarism in her academic research.

The first move was just plain stupid, not what you’d expect of a top college president. The New York Times reported that Gay hedged when asked if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated “Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment.” It could, she said, “depending on context.”

To be clear, genocide means the murder of an ethnic group, in this case Jews in Israel.

The word “context” is in itself a hedge word. You don’t say “context” when you talk about people demanding death to an entire group. You say, “That is unacceptable, and here is how we’re going to punish you.”

Boaz Barak, a Harvard professor, said many scholars thought the testimony of Gay and two other college presidents was “hypocritical.” Universities, he said in The New York Times, “have not had a great reputation for protecting freedom of speech.”

The First Amendment bars the government from restricting speech. But private entities are free to regulate speech, and where speech incites violence, it should be regulated by the private entity. Better yet, banned outright.

Several commenters have criticized the presidents for hiring a white-shoes law firm to prepare them to testify. Their testimony read more like a court trial than a committee hearing. How much did the colleges pay those fancy lawyers to misguide them into using words such as “context?”

The water is murkier on claims of plagiarism. At first, conservative media (The New York Post, the Washington Free Beacon) said Gay had lifted five phrases from the academic work of others.

The Times published the five. At least one was trivial. She picked up the words “rhetoric and aspirations” without crediting the researcher who wrote them. In an article on politics in Brazil, Gay wrote of “aspirations and rhetoric.” She flipped the words and didn’t credit Dr. George Reid Andrews of the University of Pittsburgh. If she weren’t an academic she might have written “hopes and language.” But, then, academics rarely use plain English.

The other four original allegations, published on Dec. 21 by The Times, were more serious. Worse, Gay seemed aware that she was lifting other people’s words because she changed one or two. For example, “theoretical arguments” became “theory” in a paper about urban housing. She offered to amend some of her writings to give credit where credit was due.

A simple attribution of the original quote the first time out would have got her off the hook.

Since those five, about 35 new plagiarisms have been claimed, mostly by the Free Beacon.

I claim no great insight, but in my final lecture at UMaine, I told journalism students they were well prepared as wordsmiths for an America that was shifting from rewarding deeds to one rewarding words. Enter the culture wars. Gay made my point. Her words inadequately supported Jews on campus but her deeds included dining on Oct. 13 with the campus Jewish organization, Harvard Chabad, at its annual Shabat 1000 celebration and helping light the campus menorah on Dec. 7, the first night of Hanukah. She was pilloried for her words, not her deeds.

This pot is stirred by politicians, too. Prof. Cornell William Brooks of Harvard said “Legitimate concerns about antisemitism” have “led to debates about affirmative action and plagiarism.” That is “less about Harvard than it is about New Hampshire and Iowa.” Culture wars front and center.

Most of us won’t get any closer to Harvard than to walk across Harvard Yard, as I did years ago on the way to tour the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But events at America’s first college (founded 1636) matter because Harvard is a bellwether of excellence for all academia.

Other academics called for Gay’s resignation, among them John McWhorter of Columbia University. He wrote in The Times: “There are two problems here. One is Harvard’s plagiarism policy for students … and other standards of integrity and conduct.” So, “We must ask how a university president can expect to … inspire respect as a leader on a campus where students suffer grave consequences for doing even a fraction of what Dr. Gay has done.”

McWhorter went on, “Second is the sheer amount of the plagiarism in her case, even if in itself it is something less than stealing ideas.” But, he added, “Investigations have shown that this problem runs through about half of Dr. Gay’s articles, as well as her dissertation.”

Not a lot has changed on the money-corrupts-college-sports front, but if you want to catch up on that topic, see The Countryman column, “Rot at the heart of college sports,” Aug. 12, 2023.

Forty years ago, a professor told Bob Neal that students can get as good an education at Youngstown State University as at Harvard. Neal believes that it still is. Neal can be reached at [email protected].