Boy, are the powers-that-be at Harvard invested in protecting President Claudine Gay — not just over her telling fumbles on antisemitism, but on multiple indications of plagiarism in her (scant) published academic work.

Concerns that Harvard not only kept secret, but deployed high-powered attorneys to try to quash.

The Post began investigating Gay’s potential plagiarism weeks before her disastrous Dec. 5 House testimony on antisemitism, reaching out to Harvard Oct. 24 for comment on dozens of suspect passages.

The school’s response was to stall for days, then threaten us: The first we heard back was an Oct. 27 letter from elite lawyer Thomas Clare of the Virginia firm Clare-Locke — a 15-page missive ID’ing him as defamation counsel for the university and Gay; the document quoted several profs who’d apparently been plagiarized but saw no harm.

That is, Harvard either already had its own investigation going when The Post reached out, or jumped to start one, and pin down “victim” statements downplaying any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, other reporters were looking at her, too: City Journal’s Chris Rufo at her PhD thesis, the Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium at journal articles overlapping with those we checked.

In all, that’s left four of her 11 peer-reviewed papers flagged for possible plagiarism, plus her thesis.

But the first public word from Harvard was a passage citing the plagiarism issue in the missive announcing that Harvard Corp. is standing by her as president, which noted that she’s making four “clarifications” in two papers.

Meanwhile, at least two academics are on record resenting her apparent abuse of their work.

Carol Swain, a former poli-sci prof at Vanderbilt, said, “I feel like her whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work,” and “My message to Harvard is: You don’t get to redefine what is plagiarism. Most of us know what plagiarism is.”

University of Miami in Ohio prof Anne Williamson told The Post, “It does look like plagiarism to me,” and “There was a way to draw from my paper. All she had to do is give me a credit.”

Gay is getting off easy; nary a slap on the wrist — when Harvard expels students for plagiarism all the time.

And the school’s been far rougher on black academics who don’t share her progressive credentials.

In 2019, Harvard econ professor Roland Fryer Jr., who’d infuriated progressives with research contradicting lefty orthodoxy on police shootings, was accused of sexual harassment.

Investigators recommended some sensitivity training, but Harvard instead put him on two years of administrative leave, as Rob Montz reported at Quillette.

And Gay, then dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences, pushed to remove his tenure — something almost never done.

Also in 2019, Harvard removed law prof Ronald Sullivan Jr. and his wife Stephanie Robinson, the first black faculty deans at the school, from their roles as deans of Winthrop House after Sullivan chose to join Harvey Weinstein’s legal-defense team.

Some students were upset that a lawyer would represent someone already convicted in the court of public opinion — displaying appalling ignorance of how the American legal system works.

But Gay, instead of setting the kids straight, criticized Sullivan’s response to their outrage as “insufficient.”

Last year, Gay sanctioned an Afro-American studies prof, John Comaroff, over allegations of sexual misconduct; those sanctions were still in place last month, per the Havard Crimson, though a Title IX investigation found a majority of the allegations without merit.

Plainly, not all Harvard internal investigations are equal.

No: The Harvard Corp. tapped Gay to lead the school into the woke future, and it won’t let credible accusations of plagiarism, or soaring campus antisemitism on her watch, get in the way.

But such protection is reserved for the most privileged among academics.

If Gay were held to her own standards — or the standards Harvard applies to other faculty — she’d be gone by now.