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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)

Saturday, December 03, 2005

ALL WASHINGTON DC UNIVERSITIES…

…make much of the fact that they’re located in Washington DC. A heartbeat away from the seat of power! GW, UD’s institution, is the closest of them all -- only four blocks from the White House -- and never stops reminding people about it.

But UD wonders whether the up close and personal attention about to be lavished on conveniently located American University by the United States Senate has that school pondering the mixed blessing of being an easy cab ride away for guys like Charles Grassley and Max Baucus.

They head the Senate committee that‘s reviewing compensation at non-profits, and the Ladner debacle down the street has easily caught and held their attention.

"My oversight of American University," Mr. Grassley said in a statement (These hearings, by the way, will feature high-profile use of the antagonym “oversight,” whose two meanings are direct opposites of one another!), "now will be focused on whether the current board members have performed their duties and responsibilities to the standard of what should be expected for such a major university."

With ex-President Ladner out, the Senate committee’s attention turns to the trustees, who did a bad job of, er, oversight when it came to Ladner’s compensation. Will the Senate actually come down hard on these people?



The two guys running the show look, each in his own way, capable of real cruelty.

Here’s Grassley
























Terrible Heartland Probity




Here's Baucus

















Baucus was in this race, the JFK 50 Miler, and he fell and bloodied himself, but he kept running and bleeding all over the place until he finished.


[By the way, Baucus notes on his website that "Throughout his career, Max has never forgotten where he came from or who he represents. For a full day each month, Max experiences a Day-In-The-Life of citizens all over Montana. He has conducted workdays at farms, ranches, schools, highway construction projects, local ice cream parlors, and hospitals." Since Montana’s one of our biggest diploma mill states, UD suggests a Day-in-the-Life visit to a local diploma mill.]