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Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





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)

Monday, January 17, 2005

HARVARD PREZ SEXIST PIG!



Lord knows UD enjoys giving Harvard a hard time, but she's having trouble joining the hordes of women storming out of his lectures and calling him "pompous" for having said at a recent meeting of economists that there seem to be innate differences between men and women. Some people might "prefer to believe" that differences in math and science performance, for instance, are entirely social in nature, but "these are things that need to be studied."

Or at least Summers said something like that. No one seems to have recorded his comments, which Summers, now under fire, says were in any case not his own views, but the views of some researchers, which he was summarizing for the audience. Plus, say conference organizers, he was "asked to be provocative."




Anyway, UD is offended. UD is way offended. UD is offended by the elitist snobbery that made this meeting of top economists "invitation-only." In words that UD trusts she was able to deploy non-pompously, one of the offendeds explained that only "this country's most accomplished scholars" could come. Humph.