When the news broke that the political scientist Claudine Gay, accused of plagiarism, had resigned as president of Harvard University, I happened to be reading the first volume of the Spanish writer Javier Marías’s novel Your Face Tomorrow, which, like much of that author’s work, concerns the circulation of language. “Most people forget,” the narrator says, in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation, “how or from whom they learned what they know, and there are even people who believe that they were the first to discover whatever it might be, a story, an idea, an opinion, a piece of gossip, an anecdote, a lie, a joke, a pun, a maxim, a title, a story, an aphorism, a slogan, a speech, a quotation or an entire text, which they proudly appropriate, convinced that they are its progenitors, or perhaps they do, in fact, know they are stealing, but push the idea far from their thoughts and thus manage to conceal it.”

What about a line or two in the acknowledgments section of a dissertation? In the most trivial but also the weirdest of Gay’s apparent misdeeds, her 1997 dissertation lifts language thanking her adviser and her family directly from a 1996 book by Jennifer Hochschild. For instance, whereas Hochschild writes that “Sandy Jencks showed me the importance of getting the data right and of following where they lead without fear or favor,” Gay thanks her adviser, Gary King, who “reminded me of the importance of getting the data right and following where they lead without fear or favor.” Whereas Hochschild said that Jencks “drove me much harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven,” Gay said the same of her family — they, too, “drove me harder than I sometimes wanted to be driven” (not, however, “much” harder).

I adapted the foregoing sentences from Anemona Hartocollis and Sheelagh McNeill’s New York Times reporting, although I believe I have remained on the right side of the law. Like Marías’s narrator, I “always do my best to remember my sources” — and to name them, as I am sure you do too. But one starts to feel squeamish, writing about stolen writing. As Ian Bogost put it in an Atlantic essay occasioned by Gay’s resignation, he has never plagiarized — “at least as far as I know.” But he is certainly not able to subject his own old dissertation to the plagiarism-detection software iThenticate without feelings of trepidation. (I wrote that sentence all on my own, although a Google search shows that the phrase “without feelings of trepidation” returns 402 results, far fewer than “with feelings of trepidation,” which returns 5,910.) Waiting for the software to offer a verdict feels a bit like waiting to hear from the radiologist whether an odd growth is malignant or benign. (Bogost originated the medical analogy, although I have revised it in paraphrase. And I write “a bit” where he writes “a little.” Is this kosher?)

(The phrase “Is this kosher?” returns 98,900 results on Google.)

The fact is that many instances of Gay’s “duplicative language,” to use Harvard’s term for it, are more consequential than the borrowings from Hochschild, although none on its own looks all that serious. She seems to be, as Tyler Austin Harper writes in The Atlantic, “guilty of serial, if low-stakes, plagiarism” — a fact which, given the conservative campaign against her, many of her defenders do not want to see. The “true scandal,” Harper says, “is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics.” For Harper, Harvard Law’s Charles Fried exemplifies this unprincipled denialism. “If it came from some other quarter,” Fried told the Times, “I might be granting it some credence … But not from these people.”

Fried’s comments might be wrongheaded, but to my mind, the true scandal lies elsewhere, and doesn’t have much to do with Gay or with plagiarism per se. The true scandal lies in Harvard’s response to the New York Post back in October, when reporters from the Post asked about the allegations of plagiarism. Harvard had the legal firm Clare Locke — “dedicated to litigating complex defamation matters and representing clients facing high-profile reputational attacks” — send the Post a letter denying all charges and plainly threatening litigation. “Let me be perfectly clear,” Tom Clare, a partner at Clare Lock and one of the letter’s signatories, wrote, “so there is no misunderstanding of my clients’ position in any future legal proceedings made necessary by the publication of these defamatory falsehoods.” If the Post goes ahead with its article, that “will subject the paper — and each of the individuals involved in the decision to publish — to legal liability for defamation. Harvard and President Gay stand together in their determination that the proposed article must not be published.”

This cynical attempt at press intimidation is incompatible with the commitment to “veritas” Harvard boasts on its shield. And, because freedom of the press is a cognate of academic freedom, it suggests that the Harvard Corporation’s formal respect for the latter might not be very strong. How secure should internal critics of Harvard feel, knowing that the university is willing to unleash the big legal guns on the New York Post?

This is the second time in recent memory that the leadership of a major private university exploited the threat of defamation law to quash an inquiry into potential research misconduct on the part of its president. In February of last year, Marc Tessier-Lavigne — former president of Stanford University, who resigned after extensive research misconduct in his lab was exposed — had the legal firm Cooley send Theo Baker, the Stanford undergraduate-student journalist who broke the story, a series of threatening letters.

If universities want to arrest their decline in public trust, they might begin by refraining from threatening the media for reporting on them.