Oldest and far the richest among American universities, Harvard is the apex, in some sense, of American intellectualism, and it will be a long time figuring out just how it lost a big game it didn’t seem to know it was playing: a high-stakes free for all, it turned out to be, with poisonous words like plagiarism and anti-Semitism threaded through the media coverage and then in airborne ad banners and other blunt instruments.

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Diana Eck and Randall Kennedy.

Suddenly, the president of Harvard—a black woman, as chance would have it—resigned her job under pressure, as if to confirm that something serious had indeed happened. But what in the world was the Harvard fight about? And was this the beginning or the end of a great battle?