Because traffic and links to University Diaries have been exploding lately (I figured, as the academic year neared, readership would grow, but I’ve been surprised at just how much it’s grown), this might be a good time to introduce myself and my blog to new readers.

I teach literature at George Washington University, a wonderful school, insanely well-located right under the Presidential helicopter flight path. Over the years, from my office window on the sixth floor of Academic Center,

I’ve watched hundreds of limos float by, foreign flags flapping, armored SUVs fore and aft, sirens gone mad.

When truly exalted people come to speak on campus, we’re instructed to stay away from our windows. We can see black-suited men holding weaponry on the tops of the buildings across the street.

Our hospital, a few hundred yards from UD‘s office, hosts angina-ridden vice-presidents and madmen who shoot people at the Holocaust Museum.

UD‘s daughter was born in the old GW hospital, recently pulverized to make room for a corporate tower.

Most mornings, UD stops in the hospital’s Starbucks (there are countless Starbucks in and around campus) for a latté and a roll, though sometimes – because of security-sensitive patients – it’s not easy to get in. UD likes the fact that the hospital is steps from the Foggy Bottom Metro, so that she can move smoothly from a seat on the train to a seat in the café.

UD enjoys eavesdropping on interns.

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UD‘s been on sabbatical for a year. It was strange for her, the other day, returning to campus for the first time in a long while. She met Carolyn, a student, for lunch, and after, as they walked back to Academic Center, they bumped into Dasha, another student of UD‘s.

Dasha and Carolyn know one another, and Dasha was excitedly on her way to her first law school class (she’s in an accelerated BA/JD program), so there was hugging and chatting and UD thought A rather sudden change from my sabbatical life in Key West, where I walked silently over the island knowing no one…

But why be surprised by these campus encounters? UD‘s been at GW for more than two decades, and she grew up in the Washington suburbs. If students don’t stop her to say hello, old high school buddies do. One of her GW friends, Helen, went to a Joan Baez concert with UD in 1969.

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Since UD started this blog, she’s noted, as each academic year begins, various changes. Not at GW necessarily, but at many universities across the country. A few years ago, for instance, she registered the fact that landlines were disappearing from dorm rooms. (UD still hears landmines when people says landlines. This dates her somewhere around the First World War.) This year she reads about vanishing university email accounts for new students. (UD hasn’t used her GW account for years; everything’s forwarded to her GMAIL.)

It’s the larger university changes, though, that keep University Diaries going. If there’s one dominant theme in UD‘s writing on both of her blogs (she also blogs for Inside Higher Education), it’s the commercialization of the American university (UD also covers foreign universities) in all its manifestations — corrupt, para-professional campus athletics, mercenary hoarding of non-profit endowments, crass conflict of interest in medical schools.

But really, she looks at just about everything going on at universities.

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An English professor, UD also, in her Scathing Online Schoolmarm persona, subjects terrible prose to stern correction.

She madly praises excellent prose.

She’s been known to write limericks and other verse forms here; she also analyzes the poetry of others, great and crappy.