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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)

Saturday, January 21, 2006

A Providential Turn,
Aesthetically


February is vagina month on campuses all over the United States, as Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues is performed in front of chanting undergraduate women.

The new president of Providence College, a Catholic and Dominican school, has forbidden its performance (an earlier president allowed it) because the play “is not appropriate for a school with our mission.”

In a letter to the campus community, the president says that although the play aims to be “a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery” it actually “simplifies and demystifies it by reducing it to the vagina.”

Hostile as she is to censorship, UD admits to a twinge of pleasure on aesthetic grounds.