


UD‘s county – Montgomery – barely holds on to its top twenty richest counties in the country ranking.

… has built himself quite the successful restaurant business. (One of the owners lives around the corner.)


… are off for their annual Halloween at the beach thing. Rehoboth, dog parade, costume parade, boardwalk up and back twice a day, dinners with old friends, gazing at container ships through binoculars. Of course UD will continue blogging.
Layers and layers of horrible in UD’s hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, where a woman driver being threatened by the city’s adorably named squeegee kids takes out her gun to make them go away.
Squeegee is a venerable Baltimore institution:
One police officer estimates squeegeeing has been a part of the city “as long as murder has.”


I have to buy a lot, because the squirrels are always disemboweling them.
Big trees, little house: After years of ignoring them, Les UDs are finally having three immense trees taken down. We’ve watched our neighbors get hammered in various storms; our jokes about our impending death-by-tree have become threadbare. Time to part with the big bucks and end this.

When you inhale out there, the air is very wood-chippy.
The thud of falling limbs repeats.
Tree guys are chain smokers. Big cigs hang out of their mouths while they work.
… UD has updated her old photo on her ABOUT page. Her sister, the Morrissey fanatic, took it two days ago at Summer House Santa Monica, North Bethesda. It reflects UD‘s true age as of this minute: 66.
She is wearing the scarf La Kid got her for her last birthday in Shenandoah National Park.
Wish she could say the photo shows her blogging. It shows her, lamely and very late in the game, trying to figure out how to take a selfie.
On a spectacular autumn day.

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