August 9th, 2013
Thursday Night in Iowa City

A dispatch from America’s Number One Party School.

July 24th, 2013
Tennessee Tragedy: From Butt-Chug to Butt-Plug

Despite Alexander Broughton’s ongoing legal effort to clear his fraternity’s name (see the famous video of Broughton and his attorney at the link), the University of Tennessee has shut down Pi Kappa Alpha — a significant setback for wine enemaists at UT. (Scroll down for background.)

Broader reforms have come to all UT frats in the wake of the butt-chugging incident, including mandated live-in house directors. “With friends like these,” said Marilee Studevort, vice-president of student life, “you don’t need enemas.”

Okay, I made up that last thing.

June 14th, 2013
“She also told them Shirasaki had dumped all his used keyboards and his computer out in a country field when he found out police were investigating him.”

I dunno. UD likes this bucolic/high tech image, this meld of Outer Lafayette and a crop of keyboards…

But as ye sow so shall ye reap. This grotesque dumping is what you’re reduced to when you’ve been caught breaking into your professors’ offices and into their computers and changing the grades you got in their courses.

F grades were changed to As or Bs, Cs were changed to As, and even As were changed to A-plusses.

What the hell. Go all the way.

*****************************

If this sort of thing catches on, maybe some local farm can advertise itself as a keyboard dump. Set aside a field. Charge twenty dollars a keyboard.

June 6th, 2013
Oh, c’mon.

College hijinks, people!

Just like over in Richmond.

May 28th, 2013
Why is there something wrong rather than …

nothing?

May 23rd, 2013
Four cases of bacterial meningitis at Princeton…

… are enough for public health officials to declare an outbreak there.

A large alumni reunion will take place nonetheless; participants are being cautioned to wash their hands a lot, avoid kissing everyone in sight, etc.

May 15th, 2013
“They drove him to Tempe St. Luke’s [Hospital], put him in a wheelchair with a note and left, Pooley said. The student was wearing only a bathing suit. Pooley said he doesn’t expect any criminal charges. It would have been a different story if the student had died.”

Parsing moral responsibility at Arizona State University is a subtle thing.

Yes, fraternity members encouraged a classmate to drink himself to death…

On the other hand, when he started to die they dropped him at the local hospital…

Even more nobly, before they abandoned him in the lobby one student taped a piece of paper onto his body with information about how much he’d had to drink. The world will little note, nor long remember, exactly what the student wrote, but it can never forget what he did …

Similarly, after an exploding beer bottle someone threw into a bonfire badly burned two women, ASU students “helped extinguish the girls’ flaming skin.” Then they “kicked them out of the party to avoid getting into trouble.”

***********************

These are the sorts of moral scenarios philosophy professors like to use in their classrooms. They’re stories with a rich ambiguity that can provoke valuable discussion.

After cheering while a friend drinks himself to the point of death, should you

1. put him away in a room to die or sleep it off?
2. take him to the hospital?
3. put clothes on him? (he only had on a bathing suit)
4. stay long enough to talk to a doctor or nurse?
5. abandon him?
6. stick a note on him and then abandon him?

After setting off an explosion that grievously injures two people, should you

1. douse their flames?
2. throw them out into the night?

May 1st, 2013
“Sources told NBC News the three are college roommates of accused bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev and are suspected of removing items from his dorm at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.”

Now why would you do that?

***********************
“[T]wo of the three roomates were already in custody over immigration violations…”

***********************

More details:

Two students from New Bedford, Massachusetts, have been arrested on charges of making false statements to investigators and conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to a federal law enforcement source with firsthand knowledge of the investigation. … The students are originally from Kazakhstan and were already in custody on immigration charges, according to another source with knowledge of the immigration case. The third is a U.S. citizen, the federal law enforcement source said.

More details. They certainly sound idiotic enough to have had some connection.

**********************

What are friends for?

April 27th, 2013
If you’re going to flunk out of med school – even if you’ve been kept in, but put in remediation – the least you can do is destroy the institution.

Three students displeased with the University of Ottawa med school decided to sue it. For one hundred and fifty million dollars.

Howsomeever, a Superior Court judge decided that depriving generations of Canadians of medical care by bankrupting a medical school was a tad over the top.

Far as I can tell, two of the three are still enrolled in the school. A bit awkward…

April 23rd, 2013
Chemical suicides are very dangerous.

You put all the people who come to help you or who just happen upon you at serious risk. The method is appealing because it’s easy to mix the household material, and death comes fast and reliably.

Even if, like a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic this morning, you leave notes in your dorm room warning people off, exposure to others may well happen.

Six people were treated at a hospital; a hazmat unit spent hours cleaning up the building.

April 16th, 2013
“Three Tufts University students, seven Emerson College students, three Northeastern University students, two Boston College students, and one Berklee College of Music student were among those injured, according to the schools.”

The bombs hit university students hard.

An unnamed Boston University graduate student has died.

March 5th, 2013
If you can click through these fifteen photographs without laughing…

then you’re just not my type.

Penn State. If there are other students there like Mary Krupa, there’s hope for the place.

January 29th, 2013
A very high-profile drug death on a campus that…

… has had major drug issues lately (scroll down for posts about the drug scandal) is bad news indeed. The grandson of T. Boone Pickens, a student at Texas Christian University, has died, reportedly of a heroin/Xanax overdose.

January 27th, 2013
Hundreds of Brazilian University Students…

… die in a nightclub fire there.

January 24th, 2013
Let this one …

… stand for all. Let this soul, dead in his bed from heroin and alcohol, represent all of the students who, this academic year, will drug to oblivion.

Not far from graduating from Oklahoma State, he’d been a wrestler in high school, and the autopsy notes his hardiness. “The body is that of an unembalmed, well developed, well nourished white male appearing consistent with the reported age of 22 years.”

The language of the autopsy is somehow beautiful.

The body is clad in a white hospital gown.

Needle marks are noted; a fatty liver. He had been in a hospital before, for toxicity, but this time had been too much.

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
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Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
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