But what is that identity? The Governor of Louisiana and the university system regents want Southern to merge with a respectable university – one with a graduation rate above 11%, for instance – and Southern is resisting. Grade-changing scandals, an Athletic Director skulking the streets of Houston — these are Southern, and they are in danger of being lost.
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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.
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...
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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.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
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...
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...
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From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
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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.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
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If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
April 5th, 2011 at 10:14AM
Hello Margaret,
I am sure that Dr. Mason would be more than happy to address the question. 🙂
Eddie Francis
Director of Public Relations
Southern University at New Orleans
April 5th, 2011 at 2:20PM
Eddie…I hope your compensation package includes combat pay.
April 5th, 2011 at 4:46PM
let me break this down:
Louisiana’s historically black colleges (the Southern system and Grambling State) are 95% black. Lousiana’s other state institutions (the LSU and U of L systems) are 80-95% white, depending on the campus. This is in a state that’s more than a third black overall.
SUNO’s problems have nothing to do with the institution, and everything to do with the community they serve, which is poor urban blacks who live in and around New Orleans. Of course SUNO has a low graduation rate- its students work too much, take too few classes at a time, and lack support networks. The school they want to merge SUNO with, UNO, has a similarly low graduation rate, because of similar factors- but not as bad, because it’s slightly better to be poor white in New Orleans than it is to be poor black (although it sucks either way).
If you merge SUNO and UNO into an institution in the U of L system (which is the proposal), it doesn’t actually fix the problem, because the student body will stay the same- graduation rates will continue to suck. But you’ll lose SUNO’s emphasis on the black community, which is sorely needed in a state that is still really, really, really racist. SUNO and UNO’s problems are the result of urban poverty, and aren’t something that can be fixed by moving boxes around the org chart.
April 5th, 2011 at 7:06PM
bfa: I think the reason the governor and a majority of the regents wants something like a merger to go forward is that SUNO is simply going nowhere with its students. All that you say about the community it serves is true; but it doesn’t serve that community at all well. There is reason to believe this change might be for the better – though that is certainly not guaranteed.
April 6th, 2011 at 1:01AM
I can assure you, whatever else, the governor does NOT have the best interests of the community at heart. This is a man who cut funding from the universities so that he could give development funds to companies that didn’t even want them. And motives of the board of regents are fairly suspect as well, given that 14 of the 15 members are white, and none of its members graduated from the Southern system or Grambling.
This is not about raising graduation rates. How is merging two bad institutions, without changing anything else about the system, supposed to produce a good university? This is actually about saving money so the state can lower taxes again. After they merge SUNO and UNO, the next debate will be about merging La Tech and Grambling, and then they’ll move on to talk about closing Southern’s main campus in Baton Rouge and letting LSU take over its property.
The minute they start talking about something that will actually make a difference to the quality of education at SUNO, I’ll be behind it, but all this merger nonsense is is taking away the very poor opportunities that New Orleans’s blacks currently have and replacing them with nothing at all.
April 6th, 2011 at 4:52AM
bfa: You’re better informed than I, and may be right about the bad – or at least mixed – motives of some of the players here. But what if nothing – after years of trying this and that – can make a difference to the quality of education at SUNO? Nothing but shutting the school down and starting over? Would you support a proposal from the government to shut the school down and devote its former resources to, say, a two-year remedial college in its place?
April 6th, 2011 at 1:02PM
Part of the issue here seems to be “community” vs “students.” If you have two public universities in town, one historically black and one integrated since its inception, and the latter is larger and has a better reputation, and the best that defenders of the HBCU can say is that its students wouldn’t do any better at the other school, then the answer is obvious in strictly academic terms (and in terms of efficient use of limited resources). bfa’s arguments are about “ownership” and control, they’re political; I don’t dismiss them (the LSU board, for example, really should change), but they’re the kind of thing that ultimately get settled through the political process.
September 19th, 2013 at 2:03PM
[…] of Southern University, a total money-pit bearing no resemblance to a university. He was going to merge it with a better university. But that doesn’t seem to be […]