Christopher Hitchens, who wrote that sentence in an essay about Jerry Falwell, would have been fascinated by the brotherhood on view at Donald Trump’s latest rally, where Trump’s warm-up bigot, a loud-mouth diploma mill graduate (not Trump University; another diploma mill), shrieked that Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe in God and must be made to come to Jesus.
I wish Hitchens were here to describe this man.
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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.
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
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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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Medical Humanities Blog
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Ducks and Drakes
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The Bitch Girls
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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
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More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
March 14th, 2016 at 6:34PM
Trump University doesn’t really count as a diploma mill, though, does it? When you buy a diploma mill degree, you know exactly what you’re getting – a fancy piece of paper that’s intended to impress the gullible and the inattentive. It’s the employer of the degree-bearer who’s being cheated. Trump’s victims really thought they were buying something of value. They were the chumps.
March 14th, 2016 at 7:28PM
Alan: You’re right that in a sense I’m mixing fraud-types here; yet TU was I think a diploma mill in that it advertised itself as a university (until a judge told it to stop doing that), and misrepresented itself as an institution that provided knowledge, qualified professors, and meaningful credentials in exchange for money.
Whenever they’re caught, diploma mills grads also claim to have been naive, to have believed in the legitimacy of the institution. Of course you’re also right that virtually all of them are acting with cynical and mercenary awareness (typically they’re aiming to get raises based on having attained higher levels of academic degrees); but the case can be made that in at least some of these cases there is a certain level of stupidity.
March 15th, 2016 at 1:12AM
Hitchens is gone, so is Alexander Cockburn, but the latter once described a politician as a “bilge sodden pig’s bladder.” Does that help?