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UD is a hoax harlot…

… a con coquotte… a fraud frotteur… This blog’s HOAX category is on fire with scammed credentials, faked memoirs, and plagiarized everything.

And UD always loves to put another log on the fire.

Conwise, though, it’s been a pretty cold winter. There’s been no really big bilking — the sort of thing that involves not merely made up shit in a book, but an author’s fake self-presentation, etc.

So UD‘s pleased that the Hiroshima thing has happened.

The Hiroshima thing departs in one way from one of UD‘s oft-stated rules about hoaxes:

In the matter of the hoax, Europe is holocausts, America addictions.

In other words, Europeans make up shit about how when they were seven the Nazis chased them around Bulgaria, while Americans make up shit about how cocaine put holes in their nose.

Yet this latest thing, this Hiroshima thing, is American.

The author of the now-pulped Last Train from Hiroshima, about the bomb’s immediate aftermath in Japan, lied about his Ph.D.

Henry Holt & Company, which stopped printing and selling “Last Train” earlier this week because of questions about the accuracy of several sections as well as concerns that some of the people quoted or portrayed in the book did not exist, had also questioned whether Mr. Pellegrino actually held a doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Yes, what about kindly old Father MacQuitty, and kindly old Father Mattias, who presided over the funeral of MacQuitty? Like James Frey‘s heroin-hags, these men of the cloth were too good for this world.

Margaret Soltan, March 8, 2010 7:12AM
Posted in: hoax

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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

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Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

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Roland Greene, Stanford University

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Carlat Psychiatry Blog

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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

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Money Law

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Medical Humanities Blog

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Ducks and Drakes

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The Bitch Girls

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Tenured Radical

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Mary Beard, A Don's Life

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If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
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