Reporters' Notebook

Missed Opportunities

Last spring and into the summer, Harvard was trying to downplay the magnitude of the indirect cost scandal which affected it and so many other schools. Although Harvard admitted that it had been using federal grants that were supposed to have been supporting research for things such as the Harvard shuttle bus, there were no abuses like those at Stanford, where federal monies were used for fruitwood commodes and presidential yachts. Still, the scandal must have been big enough to have caused at least a minor shakeup at the Medical School, as evidenced by this recent ad in the Harvard Gazette's "Harvard Opportunities" section: