April 23rd, 2019
‘In court bombshell, witness says he paid football players at Michigan, other schools’

KAPOW! College football is corrupt!

Fuckin’ bombshell, man.

April 19th, 2019
A brawl and gunshots…

… Just another football game.

April 13th, 2019
How Long will America’s Most Catholic University Leave its Hero Page Up for a Person Charged with Child Abuse, Neglect, and Murder?

Probably forever. And get a load of all the headlines, many of them featuring his Notre Dame connection. Which you can instantly confirm by clicking on his... Hero Page. UD remains baffled as to why football factories don’t employ someone (respectable universities do) to take down the pages of the disgraced.

March 27th, 2019
“And if those people stop coming, all you have left is neo-Nazis.”

You think American soccer can’t go the way of European? Read this.

March 21st, 2019
Last year, the foulest of foul organizations, FIFA, said it might suspend all Greek soccer.

Ostentatiously corrupt FIFA and outrageously violent Greece got together this time last year and issued mucho this is really serious language after months of match riots culminated in a team owner rushing the field aiming his gun at officials and threatening to kill them.

Today’s Greece and today’s FIFA are a match made in heaven.

So obviously nothing came of this ominous concern about violence because life is about collecting money for yourself while watching your sport (high-profile soccer is becoming a violent-fascists-only spectacle all over the world) and also your country crumble into the dust.

La lutte continue. So what.

March 19th, 2019
‘Getting into the stadium, chasing the players, our agents… I have no words.’

Enjoy the photographs.

March 17th, 2019
‘I wonder if he’ll get accepted to Jale.’

The commenters at Deadspin never disappoint. This one wonders whether the all-’round nasty women’s soccer coach at Yale will end up a Jalie. The coach was raised in UD‘s neck of of the woods and went to a local school she knows well: Richard Montgomery High. I figure he couldn’t believe his eyes when he got to Yale, a billionaire thirty times over, and he reasonably enough looked around for ways he could be rich like all the people around him were rich. You know the deal, right? Our perceived wealth is largely based on the wealth of the people around us – neighbors, colleagues. How many eighteen year old fuckheads did he see driving Ferrari F60 Americas before he decided to get a piece of that?

Oh, and he didn’t only take bribes. He reportedly made his players write his papers for him. AND when told about it, Yale reportedly did nothing.

March 11th, 2019
Life of the mind, USA:

Former football player loses no-show $100,000 university job after second DWI. Your education taxes at work.

March 9th, 2019
You could get whiplash…

… following all the different dirt being kicked up in the Philip Esformes trial (earlier posts about the pious Esformes family here). Paying off all of Miami to help him run his rotten to the core nursing homes! Telling one of his comrades in crime to kill himself so as not to have to testify against him! Hiding frail baffled old people when his paid-off tipsters told him an inspection was about to happen! Giving Penn’s basketball coach three hundred thousand dollars to lie and say Esformes Jr was so talented at the game he should be admitted to the school!

Jerome Allen, while awaiting sentencing for taking bribes, took the stand in the Esformes trial yesterday.

Allen said that the son was not qualified to play varsity basketball at Penn. He said he lied to the prestigious university about the son’s qualifications because he had been bribed by Esformes during a series of trips to Miami in 2013. He testified that the father gave him $10,000 in cash each time, the money tucked into a brown envelope stuffed inside a plastic bag, during their meetings in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel… In total, Esformes paid Allen about $75,000 in cash bribes and an additional $220,000 in wire transfers into the coach’s bank account between 2013 and 2015.

Esformes’ lawyer said

Esformes’ son has maintained a nearly 3.6 GPA at UPenn, made the Dean’s List at Penn and plans to graduate from the Wharton School with the class of 2019.

But he failed to mention who Esformes has been paying to take the kid’s courses.



March 3rd, 2019
When you’re the highest paid public employee in the state AND…

… the public face of that state’s university, certain responsibilities….

Ah fuck. It’s Nevada.

February 28th, 2019
What? You thought Greek basketball would be different from Greek football?

The air inside the arena was thick with smoke from cigarettes and flares, and the stands were packed with frothing fans. Almost none of them were women. There were even fewer children. In the front row, one man wearing white-and-green face paint shook a giant inflatable penis at the Olympiacos bench. Not far from him, another man, also in face paint, was shirtless and played a bongo he’d somehow smuggled into the arena. Basket teams in Greece have firms, just like European soccer clubs. Each part of the main fan area was divided into subsections with signs for identification: Victoria, Skyros, the Hooligans, Gate 13, Kavala, and, the hardest to miss, West Block, which unfurled a giant banner from the upper deck with a menacing gas mask emblem. When the Olympiacos players came out for warm-ups, the fans made the Greek fuck-you gesture and chanted in unison. I asked [my Greek companion] what they were saying, and he smiled: “Olympiacos, motherfuckers.”

Coach of Panathinaikos, the rival team? The University of Louisville’s most famous, most celebrated, most highly compensated (but not compensated enough: he’s currently suing the school for forty million dollars) personality: Rick Pitino. Read the whole article and you’ll see that Rick has finally found his level.

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

And on the domestic front…

YEEHAW!!!! RIDE EM COWBOY!!!!

Report: Southern Miss Coach Who Wanted To Hire Art Briles Also Tried To Add A Player Accused Of Two Knifepoint Rapes

February 25th, 2019
Ich bin dein neuer Hitler!

Sounds better in German.

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

UD thanks Mondo.

February 14th, 2019
Soccer: Bringing the World…

... together!

February 13th, 2019
Sowwy, Babes.

Anal rape is all growed up.

February 11th, 2019
This is the LEAST offensive soccer fan behavior…

…I’ve read about lately.

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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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