University Diaries » “Imagine a world,” she said, “in which everything was the same about higher education except there have never been Greek organizations. An 18-year-old waltzes into a dean’s office and says, ‘I want to start an exclusive club on campus that doesn’t allow women and serves mostly white and privileged students and we’re going to throw parties all the time that are illegal, and at these parties, all the bad stuff that happens on campus is going to happen disproportionately.’”

Yeah, UD sees where Lisa Wade is going with this…

But two can play that game! Imagine a world in which everything was the same about higher education except that there has never been quasi-professional football and basketball on many campuses. An 18-year-old waltzes into a dean’s office and says ‘I want to start a corrupt and bankrupting enterprise which will bring anti-intellectuality, illegality, violence, and global derision to our campus, and will ultimately put our president, athletic director, and senior vp for finance in jail for criminal neglect.’

The NYT‘s Frank Bruni forgets that frats/quasi-professional sports represents “the total way of life of a people,” as Clifford Geertz put it, and you can’t just decide to extract one element of a total culture (fraternities, university-sponsored alcohol sales at stadiums, coach-sponsored on-campus houses of prostitution for recruits and players, general excitement at the spectacle of college students getting their heads concussed, decades of fake courses, the adulation of violent, mentally ill people if they can play football, the routine cancellation of scads of classes so that everyone can attend games…) that you don’t happen to like….

Ooh, you don’t feel comfortable with guns in fraternity houses! The thought of packs of young men, alcohol, secrecy, weaponry, and post-game rage makes you uncomfortable, does it? Well fuck you. It’s a way of life, and you don’t get to say ixnay on the guns but the sexual assault of scores of female students is okay… Not at all or all in all, as Tennyson says…

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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

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.
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The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
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I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
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As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
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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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