But there’s a strange thing missing from this moment of conservative agit-prop victory: The people who actually made decisions about Gay, who were almost all on the left and the center-left. In other words, exactly who you’d expect to be in the mix at a liberal university. Rather than a monolith to be attacked by MAGA die-hards, elite higher ed is a world with significant existing tensions between the moderate and not-so-moderate left. Conservatives may have fanned the flames, but the divides that defined Gay’s tenure — over DEI, over Israel/Gaza, over speech and even over how seriously to take...