Claudine Gay is gone. The Harvard president’s slow-burning plagiarism scandal was finally fanned into a full-blown conflagration that neither she nor the university could stamp out. After weeks of mounting accusations, several new instances of alleged plagiarism uncovered Monday night—added to about 40 earlier examples—appear to have been the final straw. Her resignation was tendered yesterday afternoon. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who helped kick off this controversy when he and fellow conservative Christopher Brunet leveled a round of accusations against Gay last month, has spent the past 24 hours doing a victory lap. It is this unseemly context that progressive academics are hung up on: In their minds, a college president succumbed to conservative pressure. And this fact is melting their brains and obliterating their standards for professional conduct. As Harvard Law’s own Charles Fried told The New York Times, “It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.” And: “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence … But not from these people.” Although the donor …