February 22nd, 2026
The power of prayer pulses through…

… the Texas school system.

February 22nd, 2026
’He pointed out that priests are asked to bless more than just boats – for instance, motorcycle blessings at the start of the summer season are also a popular tradition.’

Some worries up in Quebec about how Biker Boy blessings might have to get municipal approval if tighter secularism laws get passed.

February 22nd, 2026
‘David Voas, emeritus professor of social science at University College London, who thinks the YouGov figures are not representative, says if the quiet [Christian] revival was real, “we’d be looking for literally millions of new churchgoers, and they’d have to be very quiet indeed, not to say invisible, to have escaped our notice”.’

Wishing does not make it so.

February 17th, 2026
If you’re tired of UD’s “ISIS bride” rant, disregard this post.

Australia’s decision, yesterday, to refuse entry to a bunch of ISIS adherents (they have to go back to their camp in Syria) has occasioned another round of ISIS bride language. These women aren’t ideologically committed violent fanatics – only men have the brains to be that. No, they put on their white veils or whatever and did the brood mare thing for whatever incomprehensible nonsense Ahmad was spouting…

It’s simply a measure of how far women haven’t come that everyone feels comfortable denigrating these fully paid cult members in this way. I mean FUCK. The one thing these chicks weren’t is anything remotely resembling what anyone in the history of the English language has ever meant by the word BRIDE.

Read what Shamima Begum said attracted her to ISIS. She particularly loved videos of beheadings.

Stop with the bride shit.

February 12th, 2026
Indeed, God forbid the university should feature free thought!

The article wins the Most Use Of the Word ‘Pro-Abortion’ award. It’s a great word, conjuring images of the professor at issue loudly cheering on any woman thinking of getting one. GO FOR IT HON!! YEAH!!

I’m sure Capo Rhoades will get his way and succeed in forcing out a voice of dissent. But that’s just one voice, my man. Sixty percent of Catholics favor abortion rights. Got your work cut out for you, huh?

February 4th, 2026
‘For his part, [Stephen] Brown isn’t against all aspects of the bill. Bill 9 would … allow the government to stop subsidizing private schools that select students based off their religion or that include religious content during the school day.  “That is perfectly coherent with the basic principles of secularism,” Brown said.’

The head of the National Council of Canadian Muslims recognizes the absurdity of governments paying for religious schools, many of which inculcate values destructive to the functioning of a modern democratic state (head/body veiling for girls and women, withdrawal from the civic realm, derogation of women); and though he ain’t happy about Bill 9’s extension of secular laws in Quebec, he’s able to understand that there’s Provincial consensus on higher levels of secularization.

January 30th, 2026
A number of Azeri members of parliament are asked if parents should be allowed to force their girls to wear veils.

All say no. Legislation is pending.

January 29th, 2026
‘The defendant, James Joseph Owens (hereinafter, “Defendant”), became a brother of the Norbertine Community and Santa Marfa de la Vid in 2009, [and]  took vows of poverty and obedience.’

You may recall Christopher Buckley’s God is My Broker: A  Monk-Tycoon Reveals the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth. Brother Owens is the man!

January 22nd, 2026
“[S]ome teachers have been enacting what one instructor, Lena Lee, called “malicious compliance,” collecting spiritually themed posters from faiths as far afield as the Satanic Temple …”

Teehee. If you force teachers to display the Ten Commandments, they will have to comply; but some of them will cover the display wall with additional posters from all sorts of supernatural sources, see, not just Christianly-approved ones.

And again I say teehee.

January 12th, 2026
The release of a British report describing some forms of male infant circumcision as “child abuse”…

… (it’s unregulated, so deaths and mutilations happen) has outraged circumcision enthusiasts. But for UD’s money, no defender of the practice (look at what they’re up to in New York!) will ever come up to the standard of this 2012 piece by Jeffrey Epstein’s best buddy Alan Dershowitz, which compares anyone with the slightest objection to slicing the dicks of non-consenting infants to Adolf Hitler.

January 11th, 2026
‘European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Saturday called for imprisoned Iranian protesters to be released as demonstrations against the government in Tehran continued across the country.’

LOL as if Iran will listen to her. She probably hasn’t even had her clitoris sawed off.

January 3rd, 2026
Quebec’s North Korea Problem

Christopher Hitchens famously compared some forms of religious life to “celestial North Koreas,” where one is compelled to praise one’s secular or divine god unceasingly. As Rick Plasterer, an evangelical, puts it:

God is always the final authority in our lives (Acts 5:29, certainly for Christians, and really should be for everyone). We are commanded to pray without ceasing (i.e., frequently, I Thess. 5:16-18) and certainly before meals (I Tim. 4:4-5).

Now, if you’re France, or Quebec, and you regard yourself as a secular country, or province, you do not want to live an unceasingly religious civic life; you positively wish to assert as a fundamental value, as a definitional identity, freedom from clerical existence. Religious life belongs in religious institutions – churches, mosques, synagogues, parochial schools – and of course in the domestic sphere. The shared public realm visibly, in an everyday way, ought to proclaim that God (whichever God yours happens to be – final-authority Gods abound, and you can ask Lebanon what it looks like when everyone designates a different one) is a private matter, and belongs mostly out of sight.

If it is true that for many religious one is commanded to pray unceasingly, or frequently, and if, on top of this, one takes a, well, evangelizing approach to faith (“really should be for everyone”), a country’s going to have a hell of a time establishing a public life based on shared (the vast majority of French and Quebecois, when asked, confirm that they are strongly secular/anticlerical) secular values, as in the equality of the sexes, sexual freedom, free thought, individualism, and a broad contempt for the array of surviving primitive and destructive religious practices that bedevil advanced and less advanced nations. How to establish and safeguard a truly secular realm?

Legally and constitutionally. Quebec already has some forms of restraint on people who want to gather in the streets and pray, and on people who want to wear burqas; but it wants more of this, and proposes tougher legislation. Since by definition most religious people do not understand why anyone wouldn’t like their ways (they bear after all salvational truth to us), there’s a kind of impasse here. But, like France, Quebec will proceed to assert and defend its foundational values.

December 30th, 2025
‘At the extreme end, as outlined by theorists including author Stephen Wolfe, Christian nationalists advocate for rule by a “Christian prince” – an all-powerful religious dictator, who reigns over the civil authorities and leads his subjects to “godliness”.’

Vermeule Valley, in Tennessee! Home lots currently available.

December 22nd, 2025
Well, at least she got ten years.

We can only hope the French courts keep her there for the duration, and don’t decide after six months that I mean golly she’s a girl and all with kids and all … let’s let her out.

A longtime, hardened, ISIS propagandist, she explained to the court that “ISIS ideology had prevented her from fully grasping the severity of the crimes being committed around her.” Which is like… I don’t get that. Hitler’s ideology – killing Jews en masse, for instance – prevented me from fully grasping the crematoria smoking away at Auschwitz… ?

ISIS was never coy about its ideology and its intended actions, and puleeze don’t pull the I’m just a silly female bit puleeze? We hear that a lot from the Al-Hol honeys who wanna come home. At the very least, we know that these are dangerous people who may regret what they did but have established a susceptibility to the very worst ideas and actions human beings can generate. Their extremism and moral degeneracy means they will never be safe to have around. It will never be safe to have them walking the streets of French cities.

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

Update on one of her collaborators. Another case of a girlie sentence.

But this one was overturned in 2023!

I mean of course her husband got a life sentence for tying up their five year old slave girl in hellish heat and letting her burn and starve to death in it. But I mean his wife is a girl! and we can’t be expected to believe that a girl is just as philosophically committed an enslaver and torturer as a boy

Clearly the German courts are just as disgusted as UD by this bullshit. They are reviewing her initial sentence with an eye toward lengthening it.

December 21st, 2025
Hoodwinking Hijabi Magically Transforms All Somali Children into Autistics.

Like the fairy godmother passing her wand over Cinderella, Asha Hassan visited each Somali house and poof made all the children autistics.

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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 ...
The Bitch Girls

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.
Notes of a Neophyte

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