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And you get all these Swahili courses ABSOLUTELY FREE

[T]he “free” education argument [made by the NCAA and others who oppose paying university athletes] presumes that athletes actually get an education. The academic fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina is the latest evidence that schools care more about keeping athletes eligible than actually educating them.

… [NCAA member schools] don’t really believe their argument that amateurism is an essential component of their business model. Athletics administrators and coaches know that paying players at market rates would mean less money to pay the salaries of athletics administrators and coaches.

In college sports, managers are allowed to negotiate their own (bloated) salaries and don’t want to share a bigger piece of the pie with athletes. College athletes are both the labor and the product in big-time sports but don’t have that same economic freedom. Yet there are still plenty of hypocritical people who support the NCAA’s exploitative system while telling athletes to be happy with the “free” education.

Whatever that “education” is worth at North Carolina and elsewhere.

Margaret Soltan, October 24, 2014 12:08PM
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

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

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Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

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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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Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

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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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