In the late 1980s, while I was teaching at Columbia University, I received an urgent request to attend a meeting at Union Theological Seminary. I don’t recall everyone who was in the room, but the half dozen or so in attendance included several professors from Union as well as one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s biographers.

The immediate concern was that it was about to become public that King, while a doctoral student at Boston University, had plagiarized much of his dissertation.

Indeed, King had borrowed heavily, without attribution, from a Boston University dissertation written three years earlier by another doctoral student, Jack S. Boozer.

Although the school confirmed the violations, it decided against posthumously revoking the degree because university officials determined that King’s work made “an intelligent contribution to scholarship.”

All of this comes to mind because of plagiarism accusations directed against Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, a school that considers itself the epitome of academic excellence. The charges led to Gay’s resignation on Tuesday.

Gay, a political science professor and dean who became president in July, was first investigated in October after the New York Post asked for comment on allegations of improper citations. Harvard promised to investigate the matter. After the university found “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” Gay reportedly made “corrections” to her dissertation.

It seems that Gay even plagiarized portions of the acknowledgements in her dissertation. The Harvard Corporation, which oversees the university, however, insisted that the new president’s actions did not rise to the level of “research misconduct.”

If the rhetoric coming out of Harvard sounded a tad defensive to you, I think you’re right. The euphemisms themselves were troubling: “research misconduct” rather than “plagiarism,” for example. Many students, faculty and alumni expressed their support, and some even advanced the argument that at least Gay did not falsify data.

That’s a pretty meager defense.

The academic community regards stealing someone’s ideas without attribution as a serious matter, as it should. That’s why the scholarship we produce contains copious footnotes. I always consider footnotes the essential plumbing of scholarship; they provide attribution for ideas, and they also function as a trail of breadcrumbs so that both the author herself as well as other scholars can trace the genealogy of those ideas.

Although Gay had support at Harvard, a group of students and alumni, according to the New York Times, called for her dismissal or her resignation. “It is not appropriate for Claudine Gay to serve as President of Harvard,” the letter read in part, “as she does not represent our collective values or the Harvard that we have come to know.”

That seems to be the most telling argument in this case. How can the president of an august educational institution represent the “collective values” of scholarly integrity when she stands accused of plagiarism?

Put another way, imagine the first student brought before a disciplinary panel at Harvard on charges of plagiarism. It’s not difficult to predict the defense: “The university president got away with it, why shouldn’t I?”

This is a troubling case, even more so because Gay was Harvard’s first Black president. Complicating matters even further, the charges originated with a far-right ideologue and were then published in the New York Post, not exactly a beacon of journalistic integrity.

But where there’s smoke, very often there’s fire. Further inquiry revealed at least 40 instances of missing or improper citations in the 11 articles Gay submitted for tenure at Harvard.

Wait! What? Harvard tenured someone in the social sciences with no book and only 11 scholarly articles, more than half of which apparently were flawed? Plagiarism is bad enough, but an equally vexing question is how Gay secured tenure at Harvard with such a sparse record of publication.

Having been tenured at two Ivy League schools (Columbia and Dartmouth), I believe I bring some credibility to this discussion. I long ago lost track of how many tenure evaluations I’ve done over the years — dozens, to be sure, perhaps over a hundred — and I’ve served on many tenure and promotion committees at various institutions, including Harvard.

If a tenure dossier in the humanities or social sciences came to me with no book and 11 articles, my eyebrows would begin twitching. At the very least, I’d subject the articles to even greater scrutiny. No such scrutiny at Harvard, apparently, and so the university found itself in a real mess of its own making.

What about that long-ago dust-up over Martin Luther King? The consensus in that secret meeting, as I recall, was to acknowledge King’s wrongdoing but also to point out that, especially in the Black church, preachers regularly borrow from other preachers in crafting their sermons. Perhaps King, the argument went, was doing something similar in his dissertation.

A flimsy excuse, in my judgment, but Claudine Gay could not claim even the preacher’s defense, so Harvard’s first Black president settled the matter by resigning.

Harvard, however, still needs to ask some searching questions about its standards for tenure.

Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College.