After some controversy over three weeks, Ayres apologized and said: "in several brief instances in the book, my language is too close to the sourced material and I should have used quotation marks to set it apart from my text." However, The Chronicle of Higher Education noted that he insisted: "his citations are proper for a book intended for a popular audience but that he will make changes in future printings of the book." Critics were not satisfied with his explanation that he had simply made a mistake nor did they accept that these practices were acceptable in popular books. Inside Higher Ed noted that the same behavior by students is "severely sanctioned." Professors at other universities were quite critical of Ayres's explanation and pointed out that the method used by the Yale Daily News to discover plagiarized passages was unlikely to catch them all.