On Universities and Real Estate

Marty Levine at the City Paper called me up the other day and asked a lot of questions about what I thought about universities and real estate development. The results appear in the current City Paper, under the headline "Classroom Crowding: Sprawling campuses are a boon for students and the city -- up to a point."

Long ago, I gave up trying to calculate what I say to reporters, which I used to think would help them quote me accurately. That's like teaching a pig to sing: It doesn't work, and it irritates the pig. These days, when I talk with a writer, I just talk. The writer takes it down, and I hope for the best. That usually means that my name gets spelled right and if I have a title, the title doesn't get too badly mangled. My conversation with Marty was even more scattered and wide-ranging than usual, so my expectations were pretty low.

Expectations be damned; the article does a marvelous job of making me sound like I'm articulate and thoughtful, much more so than I recall being during the interview itself, and in that respect (and perhaps in others, but I'm only focused on this one), it's a marvelous piece of journalism.

On the merits, of course, you may disagree with what I said, which is always fair.