University Diaries » “[University of Wyoming] athletics appears to remain a priority, as the vote to approve the [increased] appropriation came on the same day that the Joint Appropriations Committee voted to cut $45 million from Wyoming K-12 funding and eliminate the $3.3 million Family Literacy program budget.”

Keeping them dumb in Wyoming.

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And okay – today’s theme on University Diaries seems to be stupidity. I mean, UD keeps reading more and more Americans worrying about how stupid we are. The context seems to be the GOP presidential front-runners, and it’s not confined to the left.

I don’t mean obvious stuff like Bill Maher’s. The Weekly Standard, which UD thought was Sarah Palin’s biggest booster, just ran a review of a book called Too Dumb to Fail. Excerpts from the review:

I had thought that Matt Lewis’s new book about the conservative Republican future, Too Dumb To Fail, had a title that was accurate but a bit ahead of its time. Then, on the eve of the book’s publication, Sarah Palin endorsed the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, with a rambling “speech” that thoroughly earned a New York Daily News front page headline “I’m With Stupid”…

[Southern evangelicals] as a group tend to lack intellectual curiosity and rigor. Bringing a decidedly unintellectual group into the [conservative] movement, Lewis contends, encouraged the movement itself to move away from its strength, its use of argument to explain America’s challenges and propose real solutions that solve them…

Pandered to by [media] “leaders” who profit enormously from keeping their flock sheltered, this has created a worldview in which conservatives are an embattled majority suppressed only by the betrayal of elites and their putative leaders. “Informed” by such falsehoods, it is no wonder when we ponder a future as I write of a Republican party led either by a demagogue or a charlatan.

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And here’s a description of the highest-profile student/athlete at one of America’s highest-profile public universities.

[Maty] Mauk isn’t just stupid. He’s a true hard working moron.

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There’s one thing UD likes about this sudden national freeing of stupidity from the closet.

When La Kid was a kid, she and I loved a series of books called The Stupids. Then we were instructed by a child-something specialist among our acquaintance that it was very very wrong to read The Stupids, very wrong to use the word, let alone laugh at The Stupids.

Of course UD and La Kid ignored this person. But it’s always sort of been in the back of UD‘s mind as an annoyance that this person said this to her and to her daughter. It makes UD happy to see how far we’ve come as a country just in the last couple of decades in terms of naming the problem openly.

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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.
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There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
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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.
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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...
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Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
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The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
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Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
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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...
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From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
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University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
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