Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University has shed a spotlight on the peculiarly academic obsession with plagiarism — using someone else’s ideas and passing them off as your own. To those outside the academy, this transgression may seem relatively inconsequential, but for those who have been victimized by plagiarists, it’s not a negligible offense. The academic community regards stealing someone’s ideas without attribution as a serious matter — as it should. That’s why the writing we produce contains copious footnotes, the essential infrastructure of scholarship. Footnotes …