In a less turbulent time, the ouster under pressure of an Ivy League college president would have been a major story. In the current political and cultural maelstrom, the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay feels even bigger than that. The proximate cause of Gay’s downfall appears to have been mounting academic plagiarism allegations against her. The deeper causes, though, lie in the clash between elite colleges, whose students and faculty lean sharply left, and a broader society in which populist conservatism is increasingly making its presence felt.

Like last month’s resignation of Gay’s counterpart Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania, her departure is nothing to celebrate. The fact that it reflects outside political pressure could set a dangerous precedent. The racist messages and threats sent Gay’s way are repugnant. Nevertheless, Harvard and other leading institutions of higher education would do well to reflect on how they themselves contributed to this debacle and how they can do better in the future.

Harvard’s failing, and that of its peer institutions, can be summarized in a single word: inconsistency. Gay assumed leadership of Harvard in a post-George Floyd climate of racial reckoning as its first Black president. A champion of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, she made racial justice on campus a cornerstone of her efforts at Harvard. The institution’s leaders spoke clearly and passionately against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and police abuse after Floyd’s death, but when Hamas launched its horrific Oct. 7 massacre of Jews and others in Israel, Gay (and other university presidents) did not immediately and forcefully condemn it. To outraged alumni and other critics, Harvard had no good explanation.

Gay modified her position and, sincerely, professed her rejection of terrorism and antisemitism, only to find herself embroiled in another political mess when she and Magill, at a Republican-led congressional hearing, responded with bloodless, lawyerly language to questions about whether an on-campus call for genocide against Jews would violate their rules against bullying and harassment. The hearing, of course, was a political trap laid by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and — legally speaking — the answer Gay gave was a correct exposition of free-speech doctrine. A call for genocide against Jews, though definitely odious, might be permissible political speech, depending on when and how it was uttered. The problem, again, was inconsistency: Recent history confirms that universities know how to define and police offensive speech when they wish to, often when it offends against prevailing progressive sentiment. Why seem to balk at an example of antisemitic speech?

The lesson for Harvard and for all universities is that it was a mistake to create the expectation that university presidents must weigh in on the great issues of the day.

The business of a great university is not to take sides in America’s culture wars. In a previous editorial, we cited the University of Chicago as a bastion of consistent standards and open inquiry. In 1967, Chicago put forward Kalven principles, which outlined an ideal of the university as the venue for free, unencumbered — and, yes, at times offensive — debate and deliberation. When universities appear to take a “collective position,” they undermine this purpose, signaling to students and faculty that there is only one right way to think.

Which brings us to academic plagiarism, the issue that ultimately brought down Gay. There is legitimate debate as to whether her failure to cite various passages from the work of other scholars was a relative foot fault or serious academic misconduct, as the conservative critics who seized upon this as a proxy for their political disagreements with Gay and Harvard maintained. Still, consistency required that Gay be held to the same standard as students over whom she presides. Harvard’s initial response, though, was to circle the wagons. Through a hard-charging law firm, Clare Locke, it threatened a newspaper, the New York Post, with a lawsuit if it published some of the charges against Gay, asserting they were false even though the university had not yet investigated them.

For all the politically motivated criticism directed at Harvard and other leading universities, they remain exemplars of scientific and intellectual merit and educational excellence.

But they are not perfect and they are not, in this case, entirely blameless. For the sake of their stature, actual and perceived, these schools will have to take this as an opportunity to learn.