May 25, 2012

Issues in Printing & Production, Lesson #347: The Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Pubic Affairs

by

A typo on the cover of the program for the commencement exercises  for the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin rendered the school name as the “Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Pubic Affairs.” The typo was discovered after the school had distributed several thousand copies of the program at the ceremony.

“Obviously, we are mortified. It’s beyond embarrassing,” Susan Binford, the assistant dean for communications at the school, says in this report from JimRomenesko.com. She tells Romenesko that the program was passed through “lots of layers of approval” with no one catching the mistake. The school now plans to send all the graduates corrected copies. “As soon as we realized the mistake, everybody went into overdrive and we went to work to reprint it,” she says.

The dean of the school, Robert Hutchings, also sent out an apology tweet to graduates as soon as the error was discovered. “Our deepest apologies to our 2012 graduates for the eggregious typo in our program,” he wrote.

The school later corrected the spelling of “eggregious” to “egregious.”

 

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

MobyLives