The University of Central Florida is full of students like Jackie Fulco, who think academics is more important than athletics. That just isn’t right. It’s “crazy,” it’s pitiful, “it just doesn’t add up,” writes a UCF reporter in the school newspaper. Why is the football stadium half empty?
It must be bad marketing. Word’s not getting out about the games. The student looks forward to a full stadium once word gets out. That will set things right, and UCF will start to look like a real university.
Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=39072
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 ...
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
[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
February 17th, 2013 at 2:38AM
The UCF reporter kindly provides a reference to another article in the same campus newspaper:
“UCF ranked No. 1 least rigorous school.”
February 17th, 2013 at 5:20AM
Jeremy: The challenge is to make it even less so.
February 17th, 2013 at 1:20PM
I know one shouldn’t take rankings like this in the least bit seriously … but there is an interesting conflation of two quite different factors in that ‘least rigorous school’ list. Its authors can’t seem to decide whether ‘being rigorous’ means being difficult to get admitted into, or whether it means being academically challenged once you’ve been admitted.
Given that (for example) Harvard is notoriously rigorous in the former sense but not nearly so in the latter, one could draw up two quite different – and perhaps revealing – lists by parsing out the distinction.
February 17th, 2013 at 2:40PM
I was talking to a couple I otherwise respect recently about their son’s college prospects. As they ran down the possibilities, and the pros and cons of each, I found myself thinking that they seemed to be looking for a 4-year band camp with some academics thrown in. Don’t think UCF is on their list, but several other institutions with what strike me as priorities problems are.