“…[F]or 25 years, I lived and breathed business, and the economy, and jobs. I had successes, and failures. But each step of the way, I learned a little bit more about what makes our American system so powerful. You can’t learn that teaching constitutional law [at] the University of Chicago, all right?”
We’ll see if the perennially popular professor-as-pussy strategy works for Mitt Romney.
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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...
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 ...
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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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[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
March 22nd, 2012 at 8:17AM
Meanwhile, our brilliant Current Occupant, with his deep and meaningful academic engagement with the the Constitution never managed to actually write a scholarly law article (you figure with his Critical Race Theory background he might have at least spun a good yarn or poem for publication). Instead, he just said this:
“We have subsidized oil companies for a century. We want to encourage production of oil and gas, and make sure that wherever we’ve got American resources, we are tapping into them. But they don’t need an additional incentive when gas is $3.75 a gallon, when oil is $1.20 a barrel, $1.25 a barrel. They don’t need additional incentives. They are doing fine.”
Apparently he thinks the difference between the price of a barrel of oil and a gallon of gas is the eeeevil profit. This is so dumb on so many levels the mind boggles. Oil is currently $107 a barrel. And a barrel of oil is processed into several gallons of fuel gas (and other things, depends on the hydrocarbon mixture; average is ~20 gal gas per barrel of oil, I think. A barrel is 42 gallons).
So you might expect the O to have a grip on the Constitution, a debatable point given the evidence, but on economics and energy? Not so much. Maybe, just maybe, someone who has run a business and knows how things actually work might make a better president?
March 22nd, 2012 at 8:23AM
What Shane said.
March 22nd, 2012 at 9:58AM
Shane, Stephen: Sure – maybe someone who has run a business would make a better president. I just wonder about a leader who thinks that in itself calling someone a professor is an insult. Ironically, this business skews commie to me (and, like Romney, most of the Republican candidates attack people for being professors as if that in itself is a reason not to vote for them) – as in re-education camps for people who are intellectual and not sufficiently of the people…
March 22nd, 2012 at 10:24AM
Maybe, just maybe, someone who has run a business and knows how things actually work might make a better president?
Except that being the President of the United States of America is nothing like running a business. Indeed, as former Presidents of both parties have said consistently, it’s not like doing any other kind of job. So perhaps it’s time to retire this canard about Presidents-as-CEOs.
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:29PM
Then, what Allen? Pull a Buckley and pick someone from the phone book? Let’s call it a canard after demonstrating it is false, not before.
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:30PM
Sorry, Alan, not Allen.
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:57PM
Then, what Allen? Pull a Buckley and pick someone from the phone book?
There is that. Or you could listen to what they have to say. But the idea that business is an especially good preparation for the Presidency is, as my former Senator Mr. Santorum has recently pointed out, bunk. There are no true equivalents to constitutional checks and balances in business. The goal of government is not profit, but maximal well-being. Romney might or might not make a good President if he gets the chance – I suspect he’d be harmless enough, if mediocre – but his business experience tells us nothing in advance.