Tradition! Tradition! Circumcision, female genital mutilation, nude beaches – these are just a few traditions worth keeping. I’ve written and/or litigated on behalf of the first two, while I’ve long lounged naked at the local beach. Why not? Why is the New Yorker so prudish as to mention my nude beach-going in its forthcoming hit piece on me? As I write in an open letter to that publication:
You could interview others who have been on the Martha’s Vineyard nude beach with my wife and me and find out that it has a tradition of occasional skinny dipping by people of all shapes and sizes, including judges, doctors, professors and political activists.
I only ever go with my wife, and I can certify that all the nudists are high achievers with bad bodies. Only the best people; only the worst naughty bits…
What I mean to say is, here’s one thing you’ll never see on a Martha’s Vineyard nude beach: a nubile fifteen-year-old girl.Never!
So do me a favor and read this first. Everything Frank Rich says there about Ma Ingalls’ rancid hypocrisy in her NYT anti-materialism screed goes quadruple now that Harvard’s been exposed as Mr. Epstein’s main squeeze. Harvard has spent decades sucking up so much money – dirty and semi-dirty and semi-clean and clean – that its endowment alone is $40 billion (Harvard’s wealth goes significantly beyond its endowment, kiddies). It sucks it up and it doesn’t spit it out (see this notorious cartoon); it hoards it. One assumes the goal (why? why is this the goal?) is a $100 billion endowment. Harvard, everyone jokes, is a “hedge fund with a university attached to it”; this non-profit paid each of its fund managers $35 million dollars a year until a few people squawked and it ended up on the front page of the NYT...
Why should Harvard – the world’s most powerful reputation-launderer – give a penny of that shit back? Why should they do anything with what they’re sitting on, you son of a bitch? It’s their money and fuck you.
[His cadre of intellectuals] could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance atelier.
On which, of course, the moral conscience of a nation and the late lamented president of the rapeabilliest and most Baptist campus in the country, appears.
… Kenneth Starr chose to join Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team in 2007, after his moral fulminations against Bill Clinton’s sexual perfidy. His obsessive pursuit of President Clinton made him a folk hero on the right, representing the defense of traditional sexual virtue and the notion that it was under assault by Bill Clinton and the liberal elite. His special-prosecutor exploits propelled him to the presidency of the conservative Baptist Baylor University. During his tenure, the football program engaged in a horrific pattern of sexual abuse that led to the dismissal of the football coach and the removal of Starr after an investigation found “actions by University administrators that directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes.”
It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo.
A New York magazine article about Alan Dershowitz features this photograph [scroll down] of then-Harvard prez Lawrence Summers, Jeffrey Epstein, and Dershowitz at a “dinner Epstein hosted in 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” Look at the setting. Look at the restaurant. Any fellow Cambridge denizens recognize it?
Let me help you. Look at this photograph.
Note the same purple couch. The place is the (now defunct) Upstairs on the Square, where you “feel like you’re walking into Alice In Wonderland,” and where very young girls being taken out to tea are everywhere.
Nice, huh? I mean, where else would Jeffrey Epstein go out to dinner with Summers and Dershowitz?
Harvard’s highest-profile professor – seen here in New York City – has titled his latest opinion piece J’ACCUSE, aligning himself with an earlier martyred victim of antisemitism. The difference is that when Émile Zola wrote his J’Accuse, Alfred Dreyfus had been condemned to lifelong penal servitude, whereas Dershowitz is accused of penile pervitude.
And the New Yorker article he’s attacking hasn’t come out yet; Dershowitz bases his J’Accuse on rumors he’s heard about it.
The pride of Harvard is a serial j’accuser, having used the same headline in a 2012 piece j’accusing all Germans who have a problem with male circumcision of being Nazis. He likes to talk about his underwear and his many enemies, most prominently the fourteen year old prostitutes out to get him and I dunno if I were Harvard University I’d really be asking myself at this point if I want the institution mentioned up front in every article about a mad filer of lawsuits who harbors a seriously misplaced martyr complex.
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UD thanks Andrew.
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And now Scathing Online Schoolmarm will take a closer look at Dershowitz’s latest J’Accuse.
Before she analyzes particular sentences, SOS would like to make a general statement about this curious little essay which attacks a non-existent article.
It doesn’t read as though a human being wrote it. It reads like something issued by the government of Oceania, a flaming piece of hackwork, and SOS wonders why this is. For all its nutty attacks on Nazi, Jew-hating Norway, Dershowitz’s J’Accuse #1 kind of read like him; you heard his authentic madhatterdom in every phrase. But listen to J’Accuse #2:
[E]very American should be outraged at this partisan effort by a giant of the media to stifle the marketplace of ideas by exploiting the past credibility of The New Yorker to try destroy the reputation of a public intellectual with whom they disagree... This is the latest weapon in the partisan warfare that divides our nation.
Doesn’t the traffic pile-up of cliches and the general odor of forced emotion suggest that Dershowitz palmed that day’s effort at self-defense off on an atelier of assistants? Tell ’em I’m gonna sue!! shouts Dershowitz into the phone, and the assistants oblige:
… The New Yorker picked on the wrong innocent victim, because I have the will and resources to fight back against the falsehoods [it] is directing at me and those who want hear my voice… The truth is my weapon in this war of words, and the truth is unequivocally on my side.
The problem with defense attorneys who’ve gotten rich defending really scummy people is that high-minded rhetoric isn’t a good look for them. (From comments on an article about Dershowitz’s latest yowl: “When the lawyer for Claus Von Bulow, OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump says that he’s on the level, what choice do we have but to believe him?”) The truth is my weapon! says Joan of Arc and… Alan Dershowitz? It’s why a lot of what he writes sounds more like The Onion than Zola. The man doth protest too much, and protesting too much leads to suspicions that a person has something to hide.
So when, at the end of the piece, Dershowitz cites an anonymous source assuring him that for a still-non-existent New Yorker piece about him, the author did research, some of which landed her on disreputable websites, one is simply gobsmacked.
[She] trolled the internet and came across a neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial website called Rense.com, which both the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center have declared to be anti-Semitic. This site accused me of beating and murdering my first wife.
Why would you write this? Why would you bring it up? You are asking SOS to regard you as Joan of Arc/Alfred Dreyfus because someone you won’t identify told you the writer of an attack on you that doesn’t exist looked at a disreputable website while researching you?
It is UD/SOS‘s humble opinion that the wear and tear of a long and kinda icky public life has caught up with this guy. He’s not as agile as he once was. Harvard can expect a lot more embarrassment.
In those days I followed around pretty close to Epstein, yeah… Just watching! Totally keeping my underpants on, but always in a corner somewhere observing like Boswell to his uh Johnson and look don’t tell me Life of Samuel Johnson wouldn’t have been a shitload more readable if he’d had the kind of access I had to Jeffrey.
So just to get this series started: The Italian. THE ITALIAN. Since she’s already spilled the beans, I can add what I saw.
She was 21 then – way too old for Epstein, but maybe it was a slow day for him because just as she describes it her modeling agent sent her there she thought for work (not sex work) and she comes into the room – I’m in the corner reading Baby’s Bris and first it looks like he’s interviewing her and then he takes all his clothes off! He lies down on the massage table and hands her a vibrator! I’m being very quiet and wondering does he want to watch her use it on herself or is she supposed to… I don’t know… vibrate him? But these idle thoughts were suddenly interrupted when she takes the thing, looks kind of confused, and throws it at him!
In her account, she then blacks out for awhile and when she comes to she runs out of the room and out of the mansion… So what happened while she was blacked out was Epstein sighs, lowers the vibrator to the floor, grabs his cell phone and calls LARRY SUMMERS to make final arrangements about a Harvard science conference he was sponsoring on Pedophile Island! I had to admire the guy. From one to the other like that.
The Italian chick is gone, he’s finished the call, and here’s Epstein still buck naked but with an ex-erection. “Larry wants me to put my name on another institute at Harvard,” he said, “but I hesitate.”
“Why, Jeffrey?”
One of his fingers moved along his chiseled cheekbone.
So that’s from a 2018 article in the Harvard Crimson – a fascinating article about Jeffrey Epstein’s and Harvard University’s long hard passionate fuck.
Still-highly-esteemed emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz (horny Jorge was eventually de-emeritized) seems to have been the, er, let’s use the polite term enabler, between money-hungry Harvard (when you only have forty billion dollars to your name, you’ll take your money from any scumbag) and sugar-daddy-in-search-of-reputation-laundering Epstein. The captain of the Lolita Express paid for at least one of Harvard’s larger erections (at Hillel! but then Epstein’s BFF Dershowitz is passionate about religious tradition), and gave all sorts of money to Harvard professors studying human evolution (also makes sense: a seemingly highly civilized man might want someone to explain his compulsion to sexually enslave 13 year olds).
Trump retains Acosta and Harvard retains Epstein’s money and Dershowitz retains his emeritus status. Love makes the world go ’round.
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[C]ould Attorney General Bill Barr run interference on this case? Yes. He is the head of the whole Justice Department, even the “Sovereign” district as SDNY is sometimes playfully called. And while it pains me to say this, given Barr’s conduct in the past acting more as a defense attorney for Trump than an overseer of justice, I am concerned that Barr might interfere if he thought that Epstein might implicate Trump, who was friends with Epstein. Barr did say in his confirmation hearings that he might recuse himself on overseeing matters with respect to Epstein because of his (Barr’s) affiliation with a law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, which was part of the Florida plea debacle. Now would be a good time to know if Barr followed through on that.
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“Harvard should be ashamed of [Dershowitz’s] association with it.”
All the Cambridge girls made fun of him cuz his house was only worth half a million even though he coached at a school worth forty billion and overrun with the hyper-rich. “He can’t even afford to live in Cambridge,” smirked the walking-distance-to-Harvard crowd; and he was a fencing coach, too, which should have meant serious money but in his case didn’t.
Economists tell us that you’re only as rich as the people around you – if they’re living way over your head, it doesn’t matter whether objectively you’re doing okay. You feel like shit. So who can blame him for trading his insider knowledge of Harvard admissions for big money? His life has been a living hell, honey.
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To access the deep structure of this story, read this. Carefully.
Ah the still soft voice of the Quaker community that is Sidwell Friends, where simplicity and selflessness are bywords of the faith… To be part of this educational community is to feel and reflect the values of the Society founded by George Fox so long ago.
Or not. Apparently so many Sidwell parents have verbally assaulted the counseling staff for failing to get the kid into Harvard that most of the staff has resigned, and the head of school has written a sweet letter to all parents about how “love blurs our vision” when it comes to the little ones; when we shriek obscenities at the staff we know not what we do.
To which UD says Awwww.
Has headmaster had a chance to look up close and personal at the Varsity Blues folks about to go to prison? Is it really your sense that the problem these people have is fuzzy over-fondness?
Quite a few of your students are cubs of America’s most brutal predators. (See p 113 Gillian Rose, Love’s Work.) Said predators don’t take kindly to kinks in the multigenerational winner-take-all masterplan.
Masters of the Universe don’t barely get into U Minnesota; they power their way into Princeton.
When grilled at trial in the lawsuit over Asian-American admissions about the “Dean’s Interest List,” a confidential list of applicants with ties to big donors whose admission rate is higher even than legacy applicants, Harvard’s dean of admissions, William Fitzsimmons, called the list “important for the long-term strength of the institution.” Earlier, during a deposition, he described legacy as “essential to Harvard’s well-being.” But Fitzsimmons couldn’t point to a shred of data to support these claims. In any case, the colleges don’t need the money. The eight Ivy League schools have a combined endowment of more than $100 billion, which they retain from their wealthy alumni in part because of the massive tax break they receive as nonprofits, a status that seemingly only can be defended on the premise that they promote class mobility.
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
