Sensationalist Gossip--and a Clarification
I've been amused by Larry Summers' response to my book. "We are not going to dignify that kind of sensationalist gossip with comment," Lucie McNeil, Summers' press secretary, told the
New York Times on February 17th. By my count, that's about the tenth time McNeil has used that exact line in regard to
Harvard Rules. It doesn't bother me, because while my book is hardly sensationalist gossip, for McNeil to label it as such probably sells books. Who doesn't like to read sensationalist gossip?
More important, note that McNeil doesn't actually say that anything in the book is
wrong.
In fact, I take accuracy very seriously, and one of the things that I promised myself I'd do on this blog is to correct mistakes that turn up in the book. Every book has mistakes—don't believe any author who tells you otherwise—and usually the best you can do about them is correct them in the paperback, which is kind of rough if you're the subject of a mistake. (And having been the subject of some erroneous journalism myself, I know how that feels—not good.)
Having said that, I do want to clarify something. On page 330 of
Harvard Rules, I write that
New York Times reporter Sara Rimer had told the office of Harvard dean Bill Kirby that the Times "planned" a front-page story on the Harvard Curricular Review. In retrospect, I think that's an overstatement. Rimer wouldn't promise a front-page story, and the
Times wouldn't decide the placement of a news story before the event had even occurred. I should have said that the
Times "was considering" a front-page story on Harvard's curricular review—that would have been accurate. But to suggest that Rimer was promising page one is wrong.
