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Death by a Thousand Cuts

While the death penalty is not believed to be in effect here, some think that the [NCAA] penalty [against Penn State] might actually be longer and considered more harmful than the death penalty, and [it has] been labeled as “unprecedented.”


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What could be worse than death itself?

A long arid life in which without football scholarships your university devolves into…

… dear God, into a university.

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Try to imagine the president’s official response:

These are uncharted waters.

Already the Princeton Review is scrutinizing our perennial top placement among party schools.

Some have likened this punishment to having been given life imprisonment instead of death. Who can say which of those two is the more excruciating?

In the short term, the university is doing what it can. We have set up a carnival in the stadium where you can watch a freak show.

But this is no substitute, as we are keenly aware. Some of you may want to visit the student counseling office. Others may want to visit the library and its resources.

Most of you, we trust, will want to hit the bottle. Penn State has lost its competitive football program, but it has not lost its proud array of bars. Go to it.

Margaret Soltan, July 22, 2012 10:43AM
Posted in: sport

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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

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Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

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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

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.
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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