CNN — The plagiarism controversy surrounding Harvard’s president is the most recent episode in which elite academia appears to be playing directly into the hands of ex-President Donald Trump’s populist Republicans. First, the presidents of three top universities equivocated in a congressional hearing about the seemingly obvious question of whether calling for genocide against Jews infringed their universities’ codes of conduct. Now, Harvard leader Claudine Gay is embroiled in a controversy over plagiarism that is posing the question of whether the academic standards that are applied to students also cover those at the top of the ivory tower. Facing a...