Why bother writing a new column every year? Go green. Recycle.
From a review of Big-Time Sports in American Universities, by Charles T. Clotfelter.
[Clotfelter investigates] the ways in which universities use their sports programs to court potential donors. He filed public-records requests with eight universities, asking for the names of invited guests who sat in the president’s box during home football games.
The University of Washington, to its credit, complied with this request. The University of Oregon, to its shame, demanded payment of $791.87. And the response from the University of California, Berkeley, was laugh-out-loud funny — a snooty version of: We’re not giving you the names, because we don’t want to.
It’s their sports programs, stupid!
… perhaps from an overdose, and instantly a sports writer starts talking on-field replacements.
His death coincides with the release of the book Basketball Junkie.
UD can’t track all of these stories – the protracted litigation, the endless terrible publicity, the money that has to be found for lawyers and settlements. They’re constant, a constant feature of the modern American university.
Seattle-area basketball star Tony Wroten will be allowed to enter the University of Washington – but only if he passes his final semester Spanish class, the Seattle Times reported Thursday… The Seattle Times reported the Athletic Director at Garfield High School, Jim Valiere, gave Wroten and classmate Valentino Coleman ‘C’ grades in an independent study Spanish class. But the class never met, didn’t have a textbook and had no coursework...
Aw now Bill don’t put yourself down. (Bill’s executive director of the Bowl Championship Series.) BCS makes all kinds of serious money, and goodness gracious there are entire universities impoverished and prostituted by your organization! You’re worth the attention the federal government’s giving you. You’re totally worth it. Hell, everybody’s reading that letter you got today from the Department of Justice about your anti-trust problem. Everybody’s wondering what the head of the NCAA’s gonna say in response to that letter.
You’re big news! Don’t you worry your pretty little head about the taxpayers’ money!
Dave Cooper, in the Huffington Post, reports on the latest idiocy out of the University of Kentucky:
[A] new proposal by the [University of Kentucky] Athletics Department to spend over $6 million on a new football stadium scoreboard — replacing an existing scoreboard that is only 12 years old — has UK faculty seeing red. … Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart stated the stadium’s current video boards “don’t provide the kind of sophisticated viewing experience that fans have come to expect across the country.”
… [T]he UK Faculty Senate voted unanimously to “strongly oppose” the stadium scoreboard proposal. The UK faculty representative on the Board, finance professor Joe Peek stated “The university’s current classrooms don’t provide the kind of sophisticated educational experience that students have come to expect across the country.”
Mike Bianchi, Orlando Sentinel.
[University of Central Florida] basketball coach Donnie Jones is being accused of using a convicted felon with ties to a sports agent as a conduit to funnel big-name recruits into his program.
Sadly, my first response when I read this story in The New York Times Saturday was this: Doesn’t everybody?
… At this point, it’s impossible to know if Jones is breaking the rules or simply pushing the envelope. And, frankly, when you look at the sad state of the NCAA, does it really matter?
Auburn, the national football champion, had a star player who somehow kept his eligibility and won the Heisman Trophy despite the fact that his father tried to sell his services for $180,000.
UConn, the national basketball champion, has a coach in Jim Calhoun who will be suspended for a grand total of three games next year despite the fact that the NCAA says he runs a cheating program that “fails to promote an atmosphere of compliance.”
John Calipari has been in charge of two different programs that had to vacate their Final Four appearances because of NCAA violations. He now holds the premier job in college basketball at Kentucky…
Background here.
They will lose this round. UK’s destiny is way Adzillatron. But the faculty is fighting. If they’re in it for the long haul, they will eventually win.
Andrew Sharp, at SB Nation, considers the latest Jim Tressel revelations:
… [J]ust what does a coach have to do to get fired? If Tressel’s still at Ohio State next fall, how can anyone associated with Ohio State keep a straight face? The moral high ground doesn’t really exist in college football, but you gotta admit, Jim Tressel sets about as horrible a precedent as anybody in the country.
As with many college football articles, this one is written with what you might call rhetoric-desperation. How much more intensity, the writer seems to ask, can I lend my language? How can my prose ever hope to measure up to the sheer unmitigated shittiness of big time university sports?
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