This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
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)

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Snapshots from Home


'...GWU is known for its swanky new housing with kitchens and dining rooms; it ranked third on the Princeton Review's "dorms like palaces" list this year. And yet, more often than not, it's the old, cramped Thurston [Hall], with its exposed pipes and dead bugs in the fluorescent lights, that sticks.

In 1968, students refused to leave the lounge of the then-all-female dorm at midnight curfew, telling campus police they were holding a love-in. During the Vietnam War, protesters marched from Thurston three blocks to the White House. One alum remembered people getting hosed down at the doors to wash off crowd-control chemicals.

Former Virginia governor Mark Warner (D) told students he did some partying when he lived in Thurston in the '70s and liberated some ice cream from the cafeteria pre-dawn. In the '80s, students in Thurston welcomed newly elected President Ronald Reagan to Washington, chanting, "Bonzo, Bonzo." In 1992 some company supposedly announced that they ate more pizza than any other dorm in the country.

Former GWU president Stephen Joel Trachtenberg stayed in Thurston one night, much of it spent answering the door for the stacks of pizzas that pranksters had ordered delivered to his room. "I'm told that there are no windows or clocks in casinos in Las Vegas because they want people to have a sense of timelessness -- just keep gambling. That's sort of how it is in Thurston," he said...."


---washington post---