Harvard Responds to Iris Mack

It appears a few people at Harvard University have taken notice of the lack of notice, revealed by Iris Mack, of her book, Energy Trading & Risk Management: A Practical Approach to Hedging, Trading & Portfolio Diversification. (SEE: A Harvard Alum, Financial Mathematics Whiz, Tried to Get Her Book Noticed at Harvard: This is What Happened)

Below are emails from within the Harvard community discussing the post:

From: Harry Lewis
Subject: Re: Economic Policy Journal: "A Harvard Alum, Financial Mathematics Whiz, Tried to Get Her Book Noticed at Harvard: This is What Happened"
Date: October 26, 2014 at 11:36:29 AM EDT
To: "Mack, Iris M" <imack@tulane.edu>

Iris,

Not to defend their editorial decisions, but Jean is right about the locus of control; the Magazine is managerially and editorially independent of the University. That’s why you get dunned separately by the Magazine and by the University. The logical response, if you want to respond with your checkbook, is to stop contributing to the Magazine (if you do — I do, because they sometimes give an independent account of Harvard events that the Gazette whitewashes).

If you wanted to escalate, you could write directly to John Rosenberg (I’ve always found him to be a pretty reasonable guy). Or this page shows the governance over the editors.

In any case, congratulations on the book!

Best,
Harry


Harry Lewis
Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
Director of Undergraduate Studies in CS
http://lewis.seas.harvard.edu

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From: Rosenberg, John S.
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2014 7:52 AM

To: Harry LewisCc: Mack, Iris M 

Subject: Re: Economic Policy Journal: "A Harvard Alum, Financial Mathematics Whiz, Tried to Get Her Book Noticed at Harvard: This is What Happened" 

Dear Harry,

Thank you for forwarding this interesting document. Let me respond to you and Ms. Mack.

First, as noted, Ms. Mack sent her information into the dedicated line for class notes. The class note apparently appeared in a timely way, as explained in the magazine in print (a bimonthly four-color magazine has longish production lead times, even in this Internet-accelerated age) and in the e-mail chain. 

Second, I do the books coverage. We assign one lead long book review in most issues; excerpt a book in Open Book; and cover perhaps a dozen titles, or fewer, briefly in Off the Shelf. In some bimonthly periods, we received not just dozens, but scores, of books by faculty and alumnae/i, and we obviously cannot and do not cover them all. Those we cannot cover by graduates of the College and the GSAS go into our class notes; those by professional-school alumnae/I have to go into their schools' magazines, because we deliberately do not overlap.

Books are selected, as are all of our contents, to be of interest to our broad, diverse readership—not for publicity purposes that might suit authors. Thus, it is rare to extremely exceptional for us to include technical or purely professional titles. I recently corresponded with an eminent scientist at Rockefeller University, whose many books we had never run; he wanted to know why; we probed the intended readership, which was all the close scientific community in his field; and discussed the possibility of covering his forthcoming, more general title. But I routinely do not cover technical works in law, business, etc. I have not seen Iris's book, but it appears to fall into this category.
More broadly, to repeat, it is important to understand that the magazine does not exist to be a publicity vehicle. It exists to interest readers in the work of the University and the broader alumni community. Where we to depart from that, we would dis-serve, and lose, readers; I am sure you are familiar with publicity materials, and know how to react to them, vs. publications you wish to read. Publicity is up to the publishers and authors themselves—we're not trying to be a publicity vehicle, and we wouldn't be good at it. That is why, among other reasons, we do not accept prewritten blurbs for books we cover; we examine the book itself, and write about it ourselves.

Finally, as to the frustrated comment, "Then your editor must be dumb as a door nail to not know that with all the global turmoil in the economy and wars that energy and financial literacy are not of interest to a general audience." I plead not guilty, and suggest that Iris read through our magazines from recent years. That this book, which I have not had submitted, appears too technical to fit what we perceive we ought to do for readers, has nothing at all to do with our substantive coverage.

As for frustrations that we do not cover work in this field, a search of 15 seconds uncovered the following stories over time: 

A review of mathematics books for lay people by Barry Mazur and Dick Gross: http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/01/on-mathematical-imaginat-htmlAn Off the Shelf listing for another lay book by Mazur: http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/05/off-the-shelf.html

A cover story on applied mathematics, perhaps a first for any alumni magazine: http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/03/the-physics-of-the-familiar (and we have covered other work often by the same scholar, who has a particular talent for making his work accessible to laymen and –women)

An Off the Shelf listing THIS summer of an excellent book on mathematics for lay readers, by a Harvard math PhD: http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/07/off-the-shelf (The book is How Not to Be Wrong; I subsequently read all of it, and loved it, and have passed it on to my son, who is taking AP statistics; and I commend it to both of you.)

Anyone who thinks we are not covering science generally has not looked at our past year of magazines. I will hold off from enumerating.But there have been features, news coverage of the new computer sciences degrees, Right Now items, etc.

The point is that we are serving readers, not authors; and cover these topics when and how we best can. As someone who has tried to write and teach about these subjects for lay readers, Harry, I am sure you understand the challenges.

I am sorry Iris is disappointed. I don't think her criticisms fairly take into account the perspective we must have to serve our readers.
Sincerely, John Rosenberg
--
John S. Rosenberg
Editor
Harvard Magazine
7 Ware Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

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 From: "Mack, Iris M" 

Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 13:53:53 +0000
To: John Rosenberg, Harry Lewis
Subject: Re: Economic Policy Journal: "A Harvard Alum, Financial Mathematics Whiz, Tried to Get Her Book Noticed at Harvard: This is What Happened"​​

The words of your own editor clearly states that you DO NOT cover science.

Read my email, and discuss the matter with her.

Iris Marie Mack, PhD, EMBA

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 From: Rosenberg, John S.

Sent: Monday, October 27, 2014 9:10 AM
To: Mack, Iris M; Harry Lewis
Subject: Re: Economic Policy Journal: "A Harvard Alum, Financial Mathematics Whiz, Tried to Get Her Book Noticed at Harvard: This is What Happened"

Iris, 

Jean stated matters too narrowly, for the books coverage or anything else. You can read our contents and see. I would suggest that, in the feature well alone, you look at the following during the past year:

A feature on the origins of life initiative (September-October 2013)

A feature on citizen science (Jan-Feb 2014)--cover story

A feature on big data (March-April 2014)

A feature on antibiotic resistance (May-June 2014)--cover story

A feature on synthetic biology (September-October)

Etc. An awful lot of readers think we do too much science! I disagree, but obviously we cannot satisfy all the people all the time.

Best wishes, John Rosenberg

-- 

John S. Rosenberg

Editor

Harvard Magazine

7 Ware Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

RW Note: I find it interesting that Mr. Rosenberg lists " citizen science" and "big data" features as evidence of Harvard Magazine's coverage of science, without having seen the actual articles, these topics appear to me to be more about politically correct science, than the Iris Mack hard science perspective.