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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, December 03, 2004

I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I?


It's not that there are diploma mill graduates up and down this land of ours who get exposed every day; it's how diploma mill graduates react when they're exposed. Wasn't it Marcus Aurelius who said that "Today I escaped all circumstance, or rather I cast out all circumstance, for it was not outside me, but within, in my judgments."? UD awaits the stoic fraudster who, on exposure of his poopoo Ph.D, shrugs off the world's contempt and the loss of his job, secure in the knowledge of his immortal soul ...

A certain twisted version of this gesture may be found in Muncie (Indiana, fellow Bluesters), where Cristobal Rael, Vice President of Operations at a hospital there, said, on exposure of his science degree from the grande dame of the diploma mills, Kennedy-Western: "It's the school's problem. They're the ones that have to defend it, not me."

This statement reminds UD of Roy Cohn remarking to his doctor in Angels in America that although all his adult life he's engaged in homosexual sex, he's not a homosexual because homosexuals are losers and he's a winner. Although Rael graduated from a diploma mill, he's not a diploma mill degree holder ...