March 27th, 2026
‘[P]arent Paul Crockett filed a lawsuit in Norfolk Superior Court accusing [Scott] Given of using so-called “Croft Bonds” — investments promoted to parents as supporting the school — to run a “Ponzi scheme.” Crockett’s lawsuit claims he invested $160,000 in the bonds and never received the promised 12.5% return.’

Dumb parents help the head of their charter school reportedly steal all of its tuition money. Even Madoff only promised 10 to – TOPS – 20%, but the good people of Croft School just kept forking it over to the head guy until the school went bankrupt.

Just as my sympathy for Madoff’s idjits was limited, so my sympathy for these people is … not so much.

October 31st, 2025
The Prince to Me a Royal Pain Doth Give

Sing it.

The Prince to me a royal pain doth give,
So saith the throne, else cannot live.
To see the fairest Fergie ne’er again!
Oh yay oh yay (etc.)

A King who reigns, yet keeps his brother nigh,
Must love reject where power best apply
To keep the crown from ruin once again.
Oy veh, oy veh (etc.)

Embedded in his lust, Prince Andrew would instead
Much rather be dethron’d upon his bed,
But once beneath the royal counterpane,
The princeling by his ruler, Sex, is slain,
And so he must be booted to Bahrain.
Inshallah, Inshallah (etc.)

October 7th, 2025
‘Iowa Senator Charles Grassley revealed the [Des Moines school] district never used the federal government’s E-Verify system to confirm [Ian] Roberts’ work eligibility and that the district is not even enrolled to use the system.’

Doofuses.

September 30th, 2025
‘[B]oys from The Bronx (even if they end up at Harvard) have long memories, know all about cops, and stay true to their friends through thick and thin (no less peccadilloes).’

Sahndringham or Hahvard, the world’s grahndest locations were Jeffrey Epstein supplicant centers, full of people peeing themselves at the prospect of moolah from the captain of the Lolita Express.

Writers at the Harvard Crimson have selected some real beauts among expressions mixing memory and desire from a swath of Harvard éminences. The Harvard prof quoted in my title, now hiding out in LA, hits all his marks: Fond memories of our lowly origins before we got fahncy; reminders that since we come from the streets we don’t give a shit about any fucking justice system (cue Jets Theme, West Side Story); loyalty pledge.

At once poignant and hilarious, a wee legal assistant to Epstein’s best beau The Dersh strives earnestly to answer Epstein’s odd inquiry about transporting minors for sex. “I’m sorry I was a little confused about what you were asking on the phone,” he wrote to Epstein. The lad is clearly trying to get up to speed on the dirty big boy world into which his massive LSAT score has catapulted him.

September 4th, 2025
Alberta, let your slope slip down…

... Alberta let that slippery slope slip down
First you outlawed soft core
Now it's 1984
Alberta let your slope slip down
May 13th, 2025
UD to Mr UD this morning:

Look at this. A high tea for dogs. That’s not even funny. That’s just degenerate.

Where is it being held?

Cape Town South Africa. Speaking of which, how many dollars to three hundred rand? The tea costs 300 for your dog, 350 for you.

Five hundred dollars…?

[UD looks it up.]

Hahahahahaha you are so wrong. Try again. It goes the other way, doodoo.

Five cents.

Hahahahahaha $16.35.

[Later that same day]

UD: Tea for two South Africans at the Baccarat Hotel NYC costs 54,977.28 rand.

October 11th, 2023
There are plenty of non-baby-beheading groups militating in various ways against Israel, and Harvard’s now-notorious Group of 33 could have affiliated itself with any of them.

However, it chose Hamas.

And now the Group of 33 is being blacklisted by corporate America, a place a lot of them probably assumed would welcome them with open arms.

[Bill] Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, tweeted he has been approached by “a number of CEOs” asking for the names of the student organizations to ensure “none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” arguing students “should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists.”

Jonathan Neman, the CEO and co-founder of healthy fast casual chain Sweetgreen, responded to Ackman’s post on X, saying he “would like to know so I know never to hire these people,” to which healthcare services company EasyHealth CEO David Duel responded: “Same.”

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

Here’s how UD thinks of it. Go ahead and publicly affiliate yourself with the fifth century. But don’t then expect to step smoothly into the twenty-first.

August 8th, 2023
Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of financial collapse over seven long years:

They could have apologized long long ago

Or filed no appeals and settled it (doh!)

They could have let up on destroying the shop

But no one and nothing could make them stop

And now the school weathers yet more horrid news

Insurance won’t pay so they’re going to sue

Yes, more crushing payout for many more years

All because Oberlin stopped up its ears

June 25th, 2023
Teach for America

The recent remarks of Wisconsin State Representative Chuck Wichgers, during a debate in the state house, have gone viral.

Wichgers’ statement in opposition to birth control points to the failure of Wisconsin’s schools to educate its citizens in even rudimentary literacy, oral expression, and thinking skills.

“Nature has an intention and when you have that act—when pregnancy naturally occurs, that’s nature doing what nature does. The woman then has to counter nature by taking something that is highly systemic and highly invasive, according to the documents and the books that people that are pro the pill stated in their books. That’s a science. We would begin to see ourselves as the ultimate masters of nature, so when nature does something it’s supposed to do and then we say, ‘Let’s not do that’—we’re talking not about getting a pimple if you eat Doritos and eat chocolate; that would be contrary to a health movement or nature.”

It is hard to think of a more poignant demonstration of the importance of quality, universal education than this public statement by a high-ranking official of the state of Wisconsin. Surely with all of America’s wealth and resources we can do better.

January 25th, 2023
See now Japan is currently demonstrating the problem with being a patriarchy. I mean, go right ahead, be a patriarchy, but when you patriarchically decide to lecture the little ladies on how they have to figure out a way to get their husbands to fuck them so as to be impregnated by them or else the country’s going to shrivel up and demographically die… they might not listen to you! They’re downtrodden, see, you downtrodded them, and they hate you because you’re the fucking Japanese patriarchy. See? So when they tell you to shove it up your ass you shouldn’t be too surprised.

When they tell you YOU get knocked up and make Japanese babies you stupid motherfuckers, you shouldn’t be offended because you’re the ones who make life hell for Japanese women and now you want to make it more hellacious by burdening them with children in a nauseatingly patriarchal state.

I mean, take a look at Hungary, boys! Same deal. How’s Hungary doing as it frantically tries to get its dick up the national vaginal canal?

Short answer: Not well.

April 13th, 2022
‘Oberlin has [fewer] than 3,000 students enrolled and an endowment of nearly $900 million; the research-intensive Canadian university where I teach, McMaster, has more than 30,000 students enrolled and in 2017 its endowment was about $704.7 million. The U.S. dollar is worth about C$1.30, so that means Oberlin’s endowment has more than USD$300 million than McMaster’s…’

But that was 2019. Little Oberlin’s endowment currently stands at $1.09 billion.

A few years ago, Oberlin College did a hell of a lot of damage to a local bakery – falsely accused it of racism, got tons of people to boycott it – and a jury’s decision that it pay the bakery $33 million in compensation doesn’t sit at all well with the school. But the decision has been upheld; the school’s only option at this point is to kick things up to the Ohio Supreme Court… or hey, maybe the US Supreme Court would like to air, for the nation and the world, a billion dollar school’s vicious attack on a local small business.

Let’s wait and see what Oberlin decides to do. Not paying will expose it to yet further penalties, one assumes; so it can’t do nothing forever. I’m figuring an Ohio court at any level will share the outrage of an Ohio jury in regard to the arrant vileness of Oberlin’s behavior. I doubt the Supreme Court would look at the case. And, you know, Oberlin has enough money in its endowment to pay what it owes.

It’d be nice if they concluded something humane and useful for themselves as a result of all of this, but that ain’t gonna happen. Mob rule will prevail.

*********

UD thanks David.

March 2nd, 2022
“Zemmour this week finally got the required signatures of sponsorship to stand in the first round of voting in April’s Presidential election – but his poll numbers have suffered a drop in recent days. He has been an outspoken admirer of Russian president Vladimir Putin and has lamented in the past that France does not have ‘its own Putin’.”

Even Hungary is taking in Ukrainian refugees; but Eric Zemmour says absolutely not. Not one Ukrainian refugee should be accepted into France.

It’s a little difficult to see France voting for its very own Vlad Putin, Eric Zemmour, especially (cough) now.

Zemmour’s tanking poll numbers suggest he might have backed the wrong butcher.

July 13th, 2021
‘Baker Tilly (the City’s consultant for the recruitment of the City Manager position)…’

UD always wonders, when these recruitment catastrophes happen, why the firm hired (at great cost) to find the catastrophic applicant never seems to suffer consequences.

College Park, where lies Mr UD‘s University of Maryland, hired, thanks to Baker Tilly, a woman whose easily accessible personal website ought at the very least to have provoked Baker Tilly to wonder whether the person they promoted for city manager would prove an embarrassment. As it is, College Park hired with great huzzahs and then fired – with what will probably be a good deal of legal/financial trouble – Natasha Hampton, only days before she was due to take the job.

[P]rior to her start date of June 1, 2021, the Mayor and City Council were made aware of certain discrepancies in the information Ms. Hampton had provided to the City.

The hyper-vainglorious nature of Hampton’s website suggests that indeed she may be exaggerating this or that achievement a tad… And how hard would it have been for Baker Tilly to determine that her college is close to losing its accreditation? Etc. You hire firms like this in order to avoid this sort of outcome.

January 30th, 2021
They’re…

coming around!

December 28th, 2020
Beware Technically Apt Men in their Early Sixties who are Getting Noticeably Weird.

UD shares a little end-of-the-year end-of-the-world wisdom with you.

Next Page »

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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