June 2nd, 2017
This is hilarious.

UD‘s friend Jay Smith offers a very popular course on the history of college athletics that so terrifies faculty and administrators at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill — a place that felt perfectly comfortable offering for twenty years Julius Nyang’oro’s Bullshit for Jocks course — that they’ve cancelled it.

Ol’ UD is more than familiar with the Kafkaesque absurdities of football factories like UNC; but she will admit that the leadership of a school peeing itself at the thought of an eminent historian offering a course on a subject arguably more urgent than any other for corrupt jock-worshippers like UNC to think about is – well, hilarious. Truly a new low.

Here’s a school made sordid by athletics, and it’s now trembling at the possibility of merely thinking about the roots of its depravity.

Read the emails in this article.

June 2nd, 2017
Ending a Proposition with a Sentence.

Years after Jerry Sandusky went after a little boy in a Penn State University shower, that school’s president at the time faces sentencing in court.

June 2nd, 2017
Ever since 2006…

… (see last three paragraphs), UD has followed the predictable – predicted – demise of Western Kentucky University as it embraces big-time football. As object-of-ridicule-and-contempt Professor Robert Dietel tried to tell the WKU idiots more than ten years ago, it’ll bring expensive slimy coaches and violent players to campus. It’ll drain the already paltry funds available for academics, and the steady march of player arrests will associate WKU’s name with criminality. The latest big roundup of players – for beating the shit out of a fraternity guy – on camera – is getting the national publicity it deserves.

I hope the WKU trustees who attacked Dietel are proud of themselves.

June 1st, 2017
Baylor Football! YEAH!!!

I felt dirty and gross for going to football games or supporting the school; I stopped going to games after my junior year.

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

When it started to come out, some of my professors would [make] little sacrilegious jokes; they’d say things like “our good Baptist institution,” and there was just a level of acrimony to it.

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

[T]he law students felt like their law degree was being cheapened by the scandal. It’s frustrating to be tied to a school that’s so obviously misogynistic. A lot of it was us being like, ‘Are you serious? It’s 2015, ‘16, ‘17; it’s an actual joke that people still think we can favor football over the safety of women on campus.’

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

Football was fun, and it’s not as much fun anymore because it’s like, look at what some members of the football team have been accused of doing. For me there’s also some frustration there because we have a really good product in the education we offer our students, and it’s like, ‘You all tarnished that.’ When people hear ‘Baylor,’ they think about the football team. Our reputation has been tarnished, and it shouldn’t be.

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

None of the women interviewed above mentions Waco’s great bar scene, so UD will. Those who think the Twin Peaks shootout was the only opportunity for Baylor women to get shot as well as raped need to know that the fun continues.

May 26th, 2017
‘If the NCAA chooses to not punish UNC for what to me are clear and nefarious attempts to maintain athletic eligibility through fraudulent means, then it needs to get out of any academic oversight in college sports completely.’

Who says the NCAA has been doing any oversight?

May 25th, 2017
Um, it’s not a novel.

VIOLATED: Exposing Rape at Baylor University amid College Football’s Sexual Assault Crisis by Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach is scheduled to hit the bookshelves August 22.

Center Street Books of Hachette Book Group announced Wednesday it will publish the novel

A person could be forgiven for assuming a story about an ostentatiously Christian university run by a six million dollar a year coach who looks the other way while his athletes brandish guns and gang rape would of course be fictional. It’s such a crudely conceived, over-the-top hypocrisy tale (including the last-minute desperate appointment of a female president) that most publishers would reject it as absurdly formulaic.

May 24th, 2017
How Art Briles earned his six million dollar annual salary at Baylor University.

When a football player brandished a gun against a female student-athlete, the response again allegedly focused on the victim.

“What a fool—” [football coach Art] Briles texted an assistant coach, according to the court paperwork, “she reporting to authorities.”

May 23rd, 2017
“It’s time for the immediate and permanent dismantling of Baylor football.”

Lordy.

And I do mean Lordy.

Here comes this CBS sports writer who dares make himself a national laughingstock by taking seriously the Christianity Baylor University craps on. Way he sees it, if you actually do ask what Jesus would do if he got caught running a rape factory instead of a university, the answer is he’d be so ashamed he’d shut the factory.

The latest lawsuit makes clear

what Baylor football unleashed on its campus and the unfortunate coeds whose lives are permanently damaged. All because an institution meant to teach, nurture and protect them allowed football to be valued over human decency and dignity.

Something about the following account from the suit seems to have disturbed the CBS guy.

According to the suit, the football team had a system of hazing freshman recruits by having them bring freshman females to parties to be drugged and gang-raped, “or in the words of the football players, ‘trains’ would be run on the girls.”

Considered a bonding experience by the players, according to the suit, the rapes also were photographed and videotaped, and the plaintiff confirmed that at least one 21-second videotape of two Baylor students being gang-raped by football players had circulated.

The guy has even thought through how Baylor can get rid of football.

You release every student from their [football] obligations but allow them to retain their scholarships if they want to stay. You help the coaching staff find new jobs and pay them until they do. You weather raging boosters who revolt and direct their money to meaningful causes. You have the courage of your convictions.

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

What he hasn’t thought through is the got-nowhere-else-to-go problem. Without football, what is Baylor? Not much. That’s why they’re just as desperate right now as that Officer and a Gentleman guy.

May 23rd, 2017
University Students Get Raped and Battered, and Everyone Gets Rich.

The head of the NCAA, for instance, makes around two million dollars a year to “police… trifles.”

But of course he earns all that money not for policing trifles, but for lending his institution’s approval (after a few wrist-slaps) to criminal syndicates like Baylor University. He’s paid to legitimize universities that continue to bring to campus people who batter and rape their students.

That’s worth a lot.

May 23rd, 2017
Universities almost never take down these pages.

But what do you expect. It’s the University of Florida.

May 18th, 2017
The problem with getting on your high horse when you’re in the gutter.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm sees it all the time: When people find their beloved institution – with which they strongly identify themselves – in the swill, they defend it by turning on their grandest, haughtiest, most auspicious, rhetoric. Our Glorious Penn State is a Bright and Shining Light! We must do battle with the barbarians who distort the record of our heroic coaches! That sort of thing.

The problem is that this approach makes you look like Blanche DuBois defending her virtue and rhapsodizing about Belle Reve.

Grand and glorious Baylor University has fallen on hard times. It sold its soul to football victory at any cost (just like Penn State) and is currently, er, reaping the whirlwind. There’s a new gang rape allegation almost every week. What to do? What to say?

Well, this is what people are saying. Many people are saying that Baylor is a solid candidate for the death penalty. Some say the regents should resign. Some say Baylor should be kicked out of its conference. Some say withhold federal funds. Here’s a typical comment:

Shelving the football program for a few years would send a needed message in college athletics that enabling criminal behavior for the sake of maintaining a program’s national ranking and economic power won’t be tolerated.

And then there’s C. Stephen Evans, a Baylor professor who grandly implores people in and around Baylor to shut up.

I implore those continually criticizing Baylor in a public way to cease and desist. You are doing serious damage to Baylor’s reputation and demoralizing those of us who work to make Baylor a great place for students. Perhaps those of you who are not on campus every day do not realize how dispiriting it is to read such diatribes in the daily paper several times a week.

The reason this sort of writing makes you a laughingstock is that now everyone knows precisely how great a place Baylor has been for students.

[A] student-athlete told her coach that five football players had raped her at an off-campus party. The coach then took a list of names to [football coach Art] Briles, who said, “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”

Baylor’s the kind of place where students need to know before they get there that there are bad dudes on the football team and that it is the student’s responsibility to stay out of their way. There’s Belle Reve, and there’s reality. That’s the Baylor reality.

Critics of Baylor’s criminal disregard of its students are not doing damage to Baylor’s reputation. The regents, the president, the people with power at Baylor who paid Art Briles six million dollars a year to protect very dangerous people who could catch footballs did the damage.

May 18th, 2017
‘I suppose no college football team, ever, will get the death penalty again, because if that swamp up in Waco won’t be drained by the NCAA, no swamp ever will again.’

When the Dallas News even bothers posing the death penalty question for Baylor University, you know fans of the Baylor Rapists are allowing themselves to wonder whether their football heroes really deserve their full measure of devotion. “If there was ever a case that warranted a college football program getting the death penalty, this sure is it,” says one sports site in response the latest team-bonding-gang-rape-on-film allegation. Did the lads even stage dog fights? Did they drug the women?

Oh, pish. Not to worry. I defy you to conjure a scenario that would draw a serious NCAA penalty of any sort. Let alone the death penalty. Cuz we just love our brain-battered boys to death.

May 4th, 2017
“I would implore you to think long and hard about whether being head coach at USF is a good fit for you before any other members of this community have to suffer at the hands of one of your players.”

The latest antics of sordid, farcical University of South Florida catch the eye of a local judge.

Coach Strong, if you are listening, in the last couple of months there have been two arrests of your players for very violent felonies. This court, and I’m sure I’m not alone, questions whether you have control over your players. It’s fairly clear you do not have control of them…

Of course Strong isn’t listening, and why should he? First, the judge is a girl. Second it’s two arrests in two months which is nothing. Teamwork, as you know if you follow this blog, means that some universities have ten player arrests in two minutes. Third, no one in the “community” gives a shit that some of its members “have to suffer at the hands of” USF players. Everyone understands that you have to make some sacrifices for the game.

May 3rd, 2017
Life of the Mind, West Virginia

[West Virginia governor Jim] Justice … summoned both Marshall [University] President Jerome Gilbert and five members of the school’s Board of Governors to his office on separate occasions to demand that the school get rid of [the school’s football coach, and hire a friend of the governor’s], who is 73 and last was a head coach in 2004.

May 1st, 2017
“Louisiana-Lafayette coach Mark Hudspeth suspended the players, but school officials noted they will save money since the mug shots of the players snapped by the Lafayette police photographer can double as head shots in the 2017 press guide.”

We’re only four months into this year’s Golden Handcuffs competition, but it’s never too soon for an update.

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

Tradition remains important. In time-honored style, one arrestee wears instantly legible clothing.

Just to make sure he could be identified, [Adrian] Magee wore a pair of No. 73 LSU Nike shorts that matched his jersey number.

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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.
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