When Dr. Claudine Gay was asked to testify before Congress regarding the growing climate of antisemitism at Harvard University along with several presidents from other universities last month, no one could have known that the appearance would lead to an entire campaign that would end with her resignation last week.

Gay became the first African American president of Harvard in July and with her forced resignation she will have held that distinction for the shortest amount of time in the university’s storied history.

It was not enough that Gay was effectively pushed out by Republican leaders in Congress, most notably Rep. Elise Stefanik. Her reputation as a scholar and academic was unceremoniously trashed over allegations of plagiarism. In the world of higher education, plagiarism or stealing the scholarship of another academic comes with penalties. Sometimes those penalties can involve suspension or expulsion for a student after being duly warned. If the plagiarism is discovered among the scholarly research of academia, then the results could lead to firing and the expunging of an entire lifetime of critical work which could include academic journals and books along with the possibility of legal action.

The theft of intellectual property in academia is more than frowned upon. It is detested. Does it occur? Yes, and innocently enough it can be as simple as forgetting to place quotation marks at the end of a quote or direct wordfor-word statement. It could happen by not properly citing a source within a sentence or at the end of a body of research, perhaps not listing the source as a reference.

The American Psychological Association or the APA has guidelines that academia and scholars follow that maintains the integrity of scholarly research and protects the intellectual property of those who either build upon the foundation of knowledge already established or create new avenues of understanding in all academic fields.

With these checks and balances of the APA already established, is it possible that there are situations where mistakes can be made? Most certainly! But the accusations against Gay go a little deeper than a misplaced quotation mark or citation. To be clear, the accusation of plagiarism surrounds the research of Gay those dates to the 1990s, and the academic papers and journals that were in question, researchers who collaborated with her, and scholars that are noted in her field of economics have all said that her scholarship was not in question and that her research was authentic and original.

So, what is the real issue at hand? Could it be that one or more of the board members at the Harvard Corporation was against the hiring of Gay and found the perfect opportunity to begin a successful campaign to oust her? The rhetoric from the right-wing media would suggest that the program of diversity, inclusivity, and equity along with affirmative action policies were at play in the hiring of Gay and that she was not qualified to lead an institution such as Harvard in spite of the fact that she is a graduate of Princeton and Standford universities and earned her Ph.D at Harvard, later joining the faculty at Harvard in the early 2000s.

Gay is an influential political science and economics scholar and researcher who has written extensively about Black America and its changing attitudes and behaviors surrounding politics. To say that it was the very subject that she has done groundbreaking research and analysis on for nearly 30 years that became the weapon used against her is an understatement.