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Doldrums, and an Update.

I

Doldrums

From her chilled house with condensation on all its windows, UD contemplates her privilege.

Yesterday through the watery streaks she saw – she thinks – a small bear at the top of her property. It was too small to be a deer – she thinks – and had a hunched crawling way about it … There are bears, now, in Bethesda, and what better place for them to gather than the long field and forest behind UD‘s house.

Inside this house are all the goods of interior existence, the sort of existence you lead when the exterior is unbearable. Meals are brought to the door. The air is chilled.

UD plays Purcell on the baby grand, and sings. Music for a while shall all your cares beguile.

Late afternoon, before night falls, UD cuts back her garden, rampant with hot sun and night storms. When, overheated, she reenters her house, it feels antarctic.

********************************


II

An Update

**
UD has been invited to teach in India next year. She is looking into it.

** UD will speak about women and technology (in particular, MOOCs) at the next Modern Language Association convention, in Chicago.

Saturday, 11 January

651. Women in the Expanding University: Global and Local

5:15–6:30 p.m.

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession

Presiding: Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Speakers: Diana Elizabeth Henderson, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.; Teresa Mangum, Univ. of Iowa; Margaret Soltan, George Washington Univ.; Catharine Roslyn Stimpson, New York Univ.

Women are often at the center of debates about technological pedagogy. Taking women and the “expanding university” as our framework, we will address pedagogical strategies, forms of community engagement, and prospects for women’s activism offered by new technologies. This forum promises to open a space for critique of emerging technologies even as it identifies new avenues of innovation.

** UD was interviewed twice last week, first by a freelancer pitching a story about MOOCs to Poets & Writers, and then by a reporter at the Argus Leader. He’s doing a piece about a local dignitary who has a degree from a diploma mill. I’ll link to these articles when/if they appear.

Margaret Soltan, July 19, 2013 12:39PM
Posted in: snapshots from home

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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

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

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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

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Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

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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

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