Harvard's Hot Gossip It's a big day for Harvard on Page Six today. Jeffrey Epstein is trying to bargain his way out of being a convicted sex offender. HLS alum Blair Berk swears that her client, Lindsay Lohan, wasn't boozing it up on New Year's Eve. Harvard College alum Michael Hirschorn was boozing it up in Mexico on New Year's Eve. And the Post follows up on the Crimson story that reported that The Great Debaters, Denzel Washington's new film about the Wiley College debate team that beat Harvard in the 1930s, didn't actually debate Harvard at all.

Five Harvard-related gossip items in one day! If only the Globe was a little more fun, what material the university could give it.

In a more serious vein, I was particularly interested in the item about The Great Debaters.
The movie is being heavily marketed on the premise that the Wiley College team of black debaters beat Harvard's white team. "Inspired by a true story," the movie ads say. Well, turns out it wasn't Harvard but USC that the Wiley College team beat.

As the Crimson reported,

In reality, Wiley competed against the University of Southern California for the national title; in the film, the small college goes up against Harvard. Why the change in schools?

“Harvard just sounded better, to be quite honest,” says Washington.

What intrigues me about this little revelation is that The Great Debaters is one of the few productions Harvard has permitted to film on campus—and it propagates a pretty significant historical inaccuracy about Harvard. Unless you happened to read that Crimson piece, or Page Six, or my blog, you'd never know that Harvard wasn't actually a part of this historical drama.

I'm not worried about Harvard's image suffering from the myth that the university lost this debate; the university comes off terrifically well in the film, which I'm sure is no accident.

What strikes me as curious is why Harvard decided to cooperate when the story is historical fiction essentially marketed as fact. Millions of people are going to come away thinking that this false history involving Harvard is, in fact, true.

Is that an appropriate deception (because, let's face it, it is a deception) for a university dedicated to the advancement of knowledge (veritas, right?) to participate in? What would members of Harvard's history department say? Is fictional history justified if the university comes out smelling like roses?

Clearly someone on the PR side of things decided that this was a good project for Harvard to be associated with, and there's certainly an argument to be made for that point of view. It's great public relations! Good for the brand!

But the decision is just another sign of who really has the power at Harvard—the image-makers, the lawyers and MBAs, rather than the faculty, who might have said, Hey, wait a minute--this didn't actually happen, and we shouldn't help Hollywood say that it did.  ¶ 5:30 PM