So did Claudine Gay really resign, or did she just “sort of” resign? According to the New York Post and other outlets reporting on the story last night, Gay is indeed stepping down as the President of Harvard University. In fact, an interim replacement has already been named. (Dr. Alan Garber.) But that doesn’t mean that the serial plagiarist is going anywhere except to a different office on campus. She’s expected to be retained on Harvard’s faculty going forward. On top of that, she’ll still be getting her regular salary, which clocks in at an enviable $879K along with the full benefits package that the school’s faculty receives. It will be a slight step down from her salary as president, believed to have been in the $1.3 million range, but she won’t have to start clipping coupons any time soon. Good work if you can get it, eh?

She won’t be leading the Crimson, but green shouldn’t be a problem.

Outgoing Harvard President Claudine Gay will still likely earn nearly $900,000 a year despite being forced to resign her position as the school’s top administrator.

Political Science professor Gay — who stepped down amid a tempest of allegations she did not do enough to combat antisemitism and academic plagiarism Tuesday — will now return to a position on the Cambridge, Mass., school’s faculty.

Prior to being named president just six months ago, Gay earned $879,079 as a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean in 2021 and $824,068 in 2020, according to records published by the university.

What the school chooses to do is, in the end, entirely up to them. But it really doesn’t sound like there’s all that much actual “accountability” on display here. Gay may not be in the university president’s office anymore, but she will still retain a position of power and influence at the school. No mention has been made of any new policies designed to stamp out the pro-Hamas, antisemitic demonstrations that began this entire mess. And to top it all off, Harvard apparently no longer has a policy of addressing plagiarism.

That seems more than a little strange. The school traditionally takes action against students who are found to have plagiarized the work of others. They are typically dropped to a status of “other than honorable” enrollment and are ineligible to graduate until their prior status is restored. And yet if the university president is found to have committed the same sin in nearly half of her scant collection of published work, she simply returns to the office as if nothing was amiss. Frankly, it sounds as if she wouldn’t even have been expected to step down if the school wasn’t bleeding high-dollar donors like an emergency amputee.

Still, the wheels turned and the chair of the president was vacated. Is that some sort of vindication for her critics? Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) released a statement that “this is just the beginning.”

Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation over plagiarism will be “just the beginning of the reckoning,” House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik told The Post Tuesday — vowing that Republicans will carry out a “long overdue” cleansing of higher education’s “institutional rot.”

“The Harvard Corporation should have forced this resignation immediately after the congressional hearing just a month ago, but they failed and it became clear … that her presidency was untenable,” said Stefanik, a 2006 graduate of Harvard College.

I’m not sure where Stefanik is going with this. It doesn’t seem as if it’s the job of the federal government to “fix” the nation’s universities, though we should probably look into how much federal money they wind up receiving. Nobody goes to prison for plagiarism or for providing offensive, antisemitic testimony before Congress. Allowing Washington to start picking and choosing who is placed on the faculties of private schools would be a dangerous state of affairs, at least as I see it.

That’s not to say that Congress shouldn’t investigate the backgrounds of these influential leaders and expose instances of wrongdoing when they are found. The universities themselves should ideally act as a free marketplace of educational opportunities. If the word gets around that a school accepts things like antisemitic or racist behavior and plagiarism, fewer people will apply to enroll or provide rich donations. The problem then sorts itself out.

That process won’t be receiving much help from the legacy media, however. Yesterday, the AP described plagiarism as the “new conservative weapon against higher education.” You can click through and read it for yourself, but it’s a stunning assessment. If activists begin researching the published work of academic leaders to discover instances of plagiarism, that is apparently being viewed as some sort of scurrilous, racist, or biased activity. It seems that we’re now expected to ignore any such activity, at least if the perpetrator falls into a politically favored demographic. We truly have lived to see interesting times.