April 5th, 2025
UD’s cousin Karen sends this from the DC HANDS OFF demonstration.

https://www.facebook.com/kffleming/videos/594496710307535/?rdid=2wuxGQrKG3KvFbKL#

April 4th, 2025
Bonhoeffer Meditation Garden with Sleepy Deer.

Vinca coming in nicely.

April 3rd, 2025
La Kid finally gets her hair cut the right length.
April 3rd, 2025
On a wonderfully dreary day…

… the mourning dove takes a water break from its nest building.

April 2nd, 2025
Mourning Dove: Discours du Récit.

So the basic narrative, as I sit watching the garden from my bed, is this: One dove bobs pecks and pokes among the stalks I’ve been cutting off to make room for spring growth. Sometimes he finds one that’s too big, gets it almost to the nest, drops it. Mainly he finds the right length, and I follow him with my eyes as he flies ten feet up into a tree bordering the garden and with mucho flutter hands it off to the architect.

While it’s fun to watch the gathering and building and then of course the babies, it’s also true that for a few weeks we will deal with paranoid dive-bombers coming at us whenever we’re anywhere near the nest.

April 1st, 2025
Rabbit in the Garden this Morning. All Mornings.
March 26th, 2025
Within a Budding Grove

The morning sun lights up the late March greening of UD’s forest.

That’s the top of the MARC commuter train, whizzing through a ravine at the end of UD‘s woods.

March 24th, 2025
A wedding at the National Gallery of Art, West Wing.

UD and her buddy Ellen were doing one of those get there just when it opens and get all the art to yourselves things when, in one of the atria, we happened on a wedding.

March 24th, 2025
Chandelier and Trembling

A spectacular creekside house built by “world-renowned translators of the works of Søren Kierkegaard” is asking $850,000, which probably means you’ll pay less than that. You can hear the creek from the house.

[It’s] constructed with native limestone, is on 2 acres, and has more than 4,323 square feet. Natural light pours through large windows on the main floor, which has an open floor plan and a walk-out deck. The lower level has stone floors and opens onto a patio.

There are three full kitchens, five fireplaces (a mixture of decorative, wood-burning and gas), a sauna and a hot tub. It contains at least four full bedrooms, along with other versatile rooms.

Northfield (site of St Olaf College) isn’t that far from St Paul/Minneapolis, so urban life is also available…

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

Zillow, OTOH, currently lists petite chez UD for over a million, which tells you all you need to know about location, location, location.

March 22nd, 2025
The Walter Johnson Football Team…

… spreads mulch in UD‘s backyard. It’s a fundraising thing. UD graduated from WJ.

March 21st, 2025
Spring à la UD.

Altogether odd and beautiful weather this spring, back and forth from sunny and warm and calm to gray and cool and windy. I’ve tossed Magical Flames and Firestart onto the grate, and on top I’ve piled old woody grapevines that sheared off a tree in one of the windstorms. Mr UD got the black statues when he worked for the UN in East Timor. The tan camels we brought back from India, and to the right is a Corbu-themed quilt that students of Jerzy Soltan made for him.

UD reflects, looking at this fire and also at people/dogs walking on Rokeby Avenue, that though she’s done quite a lot of traveling (as you know if you read this blog), she likes best to be at her peaceful home, whose last owner was Munro Leaf. Ferdinand the Bull’s spirit remains here, decades after the death of the man who conjured him.

March 19th, 2025
Tesla, we hardly knew ye.

Musk vacates UD‘s local mall.

March 7th, 2025
Over a winter garden just beginning to spring…

… a pink sunrise with pink contrail. An hour ago, from the deck outside my bedroom.

Yellow, white, and purple wildflowers are everywhere.

March 3rd, 2025
Snowdrops shoot up cuz it’s spring.

UD‘s woods.

March 1st, 2025
Europe, 1960. Camping in our VW Bus.

UD’s in the middle.

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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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