University Diaries » Snapshots from Home

I didn’t want to walk. The morning was beautiful, sugar maples blazing on Kenilworth, but I didn’t want to walk. Not to Strathmore for a Ride-on, and certainly not all the way to the metro.

Five paces along, I bumped into Mrs F., red-faced from walking her two dogs (she has four; where are the others?). We talked about our daughters, lifelong friends. How do they like college?

Mrs F. panted away down Rokeby, pulled hard by the animals.

Follow her home wait while she showers get a ride…

Not practical. Take too long.

A small green Toyota rolled by.

STOP GIVE ME A RIDE

Slower, slower, stop. Window down, white-haired lady.

“Wanna ride?”

“You read my mind!”

Then commenced a classic Garrett Park encounter.

A scan of this woman’s features told me

1.) I’d known her all my life.

2.) I had no idea who she was.

Our varied, warm conversation began with the sugar maples, moved to the town’s antique streetlamps, swerved back to trees – the royal palms I admired in Key West, the stately palms she saw in Palo Alto – and then leapt for no reason to a hotel in she stayed in once.

“They gave you the loveliest, softest white robe. I wanted to wear it the whole time I was there. My daughter said Don’t prowl around the halls wearing the robe. Only tacky guests do that.”

Now town history.

“The town put an oak in front of our house. It grew too big. Next door used to be Joan R. I loved the way she called to her son all the time. HUGHIE! HUGHIE! HUGHIE!”

“She was Welsh.”

“British. Welsh. Something like that.”

“Evil husband who left her with tons of kids.”

“Right. He left her. But she only had three. I was the one with tons. I had nine…. Our line of houses on Strathmore — three houses, three breast cancer cases. I always thought that was odd.”

“Nine kids.”

“Eight boys. One girl.”

“You kept trying for a girl?”

“No. There was no excuse for all those boys. I just kept doing it. I got pregnant in 1976 and said to my husband a child for the bicentennial. Any excuse would do.”

We pulled up to the station. She wished me a wonderful day.

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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.
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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...
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Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
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[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.
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The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
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Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
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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...
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From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
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I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
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As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
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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.
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University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
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