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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)

Monday, July 24, 2006

Alex Beam, in today's Boston Globe,
Stirs Sweet Memories for UD...


...of her time at Trump University. Beam writes:

One dreams of returning to the university. The tree-shadowed walkways. The shared goals of learning. The sexual and somatic adventuring. Ah, the student life.

In early May, I received an unsolicited invitation to join Trump University, which sounds like the kind of institution you might find parodied on the comics page. (In fact, it has been mocked in ``Doonesbury.") This wasn't like the letters my sons received when they were in high school, inviting them to apply to universities. This was an acceptance letter, a ``personal invite" from Donald Trump, contingent on my coughing up $40. Which I did.

You probably think I've been kicking back at my summer job bagging groceries while classes were out of session, but Trump U doesn't slow down. ``Focus is very important, and momentum," TU chairman Donald tells us in one of his many communications. TU is about learning, 24/7, with no shortage of face time with Himself. If you call watching little streaming video clips of Donald pontificating face time. Which, in a sense, it is. His face. Your time. Your money.

Here's what you get for the initial buy-in at TU: video Trumptalks on subjects like ``Dealing With Failure," ``Creating a Great Brand," ``Career Advice , " and ``Salesmanship." Sample pabulum: ``There's nothing like a great salesperson. I put them up with the greatest people in the world."

You also receive a subscription to ``Inside the Trump Tower," a newsletter chock full of windy little essays. I especially enjoyed the moronic outing, ``The End of the MBA is Nigh!" by business guru and self-promoter extraordinaire Tom Peters . It's a quick piece of nothing fluff that never mentions the author's own MBA from Stanford University.

All over the website -- because that's all TU is, a website (www.trumpuniversity.com) -- chairman Trump rattles on about the value of extramural ``education" like TU. To recycle the slur often directed at President Bush, Trump is a man who was born on third base who later made much of hitting a home run; his father was a successful New York real estate magnate and Donald has a graduate degree from the Wharton School.

Inevitably, he blogs: ``Britney [Spears] has seen better days. She performed four or five years ago at the Trump Taj Mahal and she was great. Now it seems as if everything's slipping away from her. Britney, don't let that happen. Don't let it slip away. Keep your head on straight." Can you imagine Larry Summers bloviating about Madonna? Maybe he should have.

And, of course, Trump's favorite subject is . . . Trump. In one of his homilies, he celebrates the Top Ten Books on Entrepreneurship. The first six books were authored by, yes, Donald Trump.

Another ``benefit" of matriculating at Trump U is receiving a near-constant stream of e-mails and occasional phone calls from TU staffers trying to sell you more courses. Shortly after I enrolled, TU president Michael Sexton invited me ``to purchase a remarkable audio/video course available exclusively from Trump University. For the first time ever, Donald Trump has created a complete eight-week course on how to get rich." I continue to receive invitations to enroll at TU, even though I am already a student. A slip-up at the dean's office, I guess.

I called Sexton, and he picked up on the first ring. From his office at the Trump Building on 40 Wall Street, Sexton semi-apologized for the blizzard of come-ons I'd been receiving. ``We want to get people to take the first step and enroll for a course," he explained. He said TU had ``perhaps been a little overexuberant" in hyping its exciting new products. ``We've had feedback that we should be cutting down on the touch points," which I am guessing is businesspeak for ``people have been complaining about the spam."

``We don't spam anybody," he insisted. Just hours after he said this, I received yet another spam invitation for me to join Trump University. I forwarded the e-mail to him, with the comment, ``Michael, if this isn't spam, what is?" I have yet to hear back, but I know how busy university presidents are these days.