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“All graduate students who supervise undergraduate students receive an email at the beginning of each semester which highlights important points to consider about the alcohol culture at the University of Georgia. One of these points is to refrain from humorous stories involving alcohol consumption.”

Assuming this is true (it appears in an opinion piece about how the University of Georgia newspaper should cover student alcohol arrests) it’s part of an intriguing trend at American party schools. As at the University of Iowa, another booze-soaked extravaganza with full cooperation from the administration, so now at the University of Georgia, you’ve got this rhetorical tweaking – a small line about drinking responsibly at the bottom of screaming ads for Saturday night specials; regular emails to teaching assistants discouraging them from telling students funny alcohol-related stories…

Every semester, as you gaze out your office window at the massive two-day cleanup after the last campus tailgate, every semester a vaguely coercive little note about how Oh by the way lose the When me and the lads got shitfaced bit… And God no Baudelaire wafts your way…

Margaret Soltan, September 2, 2012 8:57AM
Posted in: demon rum

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One Response to ““All graduate students who supervise undergraduate students receive an email at the beginning of each semester which highlights important points to consider about the alcohol culture at the University of Georgia. One of these points is to refrain from humorous stories involving alcohol consumption.””

  1. david foster Says:

    “But it should not further mock the reputations of those who have made this mistake, nor inadvertently glorify their behavior to other student readers.”

    Seems like a self-contradictory sentence…how do you simultaneously mock someone and glorify him?

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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.
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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.
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