February 12th, 2026
‘The alleged shooter’s attorneys called Monday’s shooting a contained incident, arguing that there was no greater threat to other students or staff in the high school.’

UD’s favorite part, always, is when we start to hear from the lawyers.

February 10th, 2026
UD never forgets…

… that schools shot up by teen – and pre-teen – shits are all around her, even in her affluent ‘thesdan world. Wootten High – which Les UDs routinely drive by on their way to UD’s sister’s place – just had one of its students almost killed by another student with a gun. Right there in the school and all.

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

UPDATE: Same asshole pointed his gun at another student in the hallway earlier the same day! But she didn’t report it! Routine hallway interaction?

And listen. No one’s gonna be surprised when we find out that the school was well aware the shooter was a way risky person… Parents have GOT to get mad about the fact that the school hadn’t expelled him.

Why do public schools feel impelled to expose their students to lethal risk by letting shooters attend?

January 18th, 2026
Massacre Management in Louisiana

They’ve long held the national Number One spot for murders, but when murders happen, they mobilize a whole nothing to see here protocol. Even the NYT plays along, insisting on how isolated and rare a recent massacre at a restaurant was, its neighborhood “hushed” with shock.

Toward the end of the piece the writer does allow as how the restaurant “is within walking distance of the city’s French Quarter … — the site of an attack that killed 14 people a year ago,” but most of the article maunders on about the restaurant’s history – strikingly irrelevant to a mass shooting. Nowhere does the writer note that this sort of carnage is something of a banality in gun-loving LA.

December 18th, 2025
Barking Mad.

Some witnesses said he said nothing. There are some that say he made a barking noise.

How easy, in the USA, for an absolute lunatic to get a gun and kill Brown U. students and an MIT professor.

The motive is also easy: Loser Kills Winner. Graduated from the same school in Portugal as a man who went on to lead a lab at MIT, while this guy went nowhere. Ditto for the Brown students – he dropped out of Brown; they were succeeding there. All had to die.

December 14th, 2025
Intro Terminal Ballistics

[The economics instructor] said he hid behind a desk with about 20 … students, and that one was shot in the leg.

About 20 other students ran out of the room’s side doors, he said. The students who were sitting in the middle row had a harder time escaping the gunfire. “The students in the middle were impacted the most,” he said. “Many of them were lying there and they were not moving. I have no idea how many.”

December 13th, 2025
The fog of war at Brown University.

No one knows much of anything yet, but there’s apparently been an active shooter on campus for some time, and there may be multiple victims.

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

Two dead, nine critical. So far.

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

‘Gov. Dan McKee of Rhode Island described the shooting as “an unthinkable nightmare”…’ How tone deaf can you be. Not only thinkable — same old same old.

Yes, same old, same old.

December 10th, 2025
Headline of the Day

Wisconsin Gun Deer Season Over, Other Opportunities Still Available

December 10th, 2025
It’s always like … wow!

Wow! Fatal shooting (a second student was injured) on a university campus in Frankfort KY! Just wow! Second such incident on that campus in four months! “Kentucky’s gun laws are among the worst in the country, and the state has one of the higher rates of gun violence in the nation,” but wow Guv says it’s an isolated incident! SOOOOOOO shocking! In Kentucky of all places. School is so shocked they’ve cancelled classes for the rest of the semester cuz man things like that just don’t happen around here.

December 5th, 2025
Yes, yes, nothing to see here!

Gun Recovered Friday during Northwood High Lockdown, No Threat to School Community, Police Say

At a high school minutes away from UD‘s house, two students get in a fight and one pulls out a gun. But it’s certainly no threat to the school community that this little fucker plus plenty of others carry weapons on campus. Relax!

Friday was the second time this school year that Northwood High has been placed on lockdown. In September, administrators ordered a lockdown and secure status after reports of a weapon on campus. During that incident, a gun magazine, BB gun and a live 9 mm round were recovered from students. 

No metal detectors? Why not? And why nothing about expulsion of arms-bearing assholes? Waiting for them to kill someone before you ask them to leave?

November 30th, 2025
Pink horsie, barbed wire, baby blood —

The Stockton Look.

November 27th, 2025
Into Us is Thrust a Gun
Sing it!

Into us is thrust a gun
Glock of squire dipsomal
See the carolers run-run-run
As they sing of Mary's son
As they sing of Mary's son

November 25th, 2025
The Holly and the…

... Bushmaster.

November 24th, 2025
‘When shooting rats with a pellet gun…’

… sounds like the first line of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song:

When shooting rats with a pellet gun

Watch out for Temple Ben Zion.

And also something else the matter:

Windows hit by bullets shatter.

November 22nd, 2025
O Christmas Tree!

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!
Come gather, childen, pack the heat,
In winter’s cold and snow and sleet.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!

November 18th, 2025
‘At no point during this 90-minute movie about the products, courses, safety drills, and various other things that might help people survive a regular day in America does anyone suggest that we should try getting rid of the readily available mass-murder devices that shooters keep using for all of their mass-murdering needs, and that are basically manufactured for no other purpose than to commit mass-murder.’

A new documentary.

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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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