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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, April 14, 2006

Foggy Bottom

UD’s mother has long been an active member of the Mason-Dixon English Cocker Spaniel Club (here‘s a link, so you can go there right away), and sometimes the club meets at UD’s mother’s house (which, faithful readers know, is just a few houses down the street from UD’s own here in Garrett Park). Among the many people UD’s run into over the years hanging out with their dogs at her mother’s is Ursula Banzhaf, wife of one of UD’s more notorious colleagues, the righteous litigator, John Banzhaf.

Banzhaf’s latest thing, chronicled this morning by Inside Higher Ed, is to sue a particular administrator at GWU for not enforcing the no smoking within a certain number of feet of campus buildings rule.

Banzhaf says that university administrators have repeatedly declined in recent months to respond to requests by students and others to restrict smoking near the entrances to buildings on the campus. A “gauntlet of tobacco smoke” surrounds many an entrance to campus buildings, Banzhaf says — except those, like the entrances to the law school and the building that houses the university’s president and other top administrators, that already display signs barring smoking near the entrances, Banzhaf notes with some irony.


UD’s walked this lonesome valley for a couple of decades, and she’s got to report that for her at least the gauntlet’s gone missing. Gauntlet? Gauntlet? A pretty word, certainly, gauntlet… Even a pretty phrase, “a gauntlet of tobacco smoke,“ and UD’s always looking for found poetry… But let’s see what the word means… “A form of punishment in which a person is forced to run between two lines of men facing each other and armed with clubs or whips to beat the victim.”

I dunno. I’ve never seen smokers at the university array themselves in this fashion. And while I dislike cigarette smoke in closed spaces, I don’t mind it outside, and it’s hard to see how anyone could claim it’s a form of punishment. It is a mild irritant. If I had to find an appropriate word to describe the occasional gathering of a bit of smoke at the edges of campus doors, I’d say there’s a slight fog of smoke in Foggy Bottom, much of it issuing from sad, guilty people who cringe somewhat at your approach, expecting you to be John Banzhaf.