Atlantic piece takes swipe at Harvard prof. Christina Hoff Sommers, who set herself up in the early ’90’s as the conservative counter to “liberal hijacking” of gender studies, defames renowned Harvard gender identity psychological theorist Carol Gilligan in the latest Atlantic. She claims the research materials for Gilligan’s prizewinning and paradigm-changing 1982 book In A Different Voice were either flawed or faked. But neither Sommers nor the Atlantic ever contacted Gilligan to check this claim, and it apparently just isn’t true, reports Alex Beam of the Boston Globe. “Didn’t the Atlantic find it strange that Gilligan isn’t quoted

defending herself against Sommers’s dramatic accusation? ‘Sommers said to me that she tried unsuccessfully to reach

Gilligan,’ reports story editor Michael Curtis. He says Sommers’s

article wasn’t subjected to the usual fact-checking scrutiny

because it was a book excerpt, not an assigned article. Gilligan

will have to defend herself in a letter to the editor, which

won’t attract quite as much attention as Sommers’s cover story.”