Ringside fun for everyone, just a few miles from UD‘s house!
******
They’re dropping like flies! Get to a ring while they’re hot. I mean cold.
Ringside fun for everyone, just a few miles from UD‘s house!
******
They’re dropping like flies! Get to a ring while they’re hot. I mean cold.
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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.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
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
July 30th, 2019 at 2:43PM
When I was 13, my dad signed me up for a Golden Gloves league. For most of the summer, we hit heavy bags, learned to use the speed bag, footwork drills, conditioning, all of it. But no one can claim to be a boxer if they don’t spar. So, after the boilerplate was done, I had to get into the ring with a kid my age and approximate size.
Keep in mind we had head gear, big gloves, and the trainers told my opponent to go easy with me. He had been at the sport for a few years, to my couple months. For every punch I got in, he hit me with three. Nothing too hard, enough to snap my head back, but no blood, no broken noses. After three rounds, it was done and I felt okay, though my cheek stung.
My cousin came to pick me up. I always greeted her with “Anna Banana.” As I got into the car and went to say her favorite nickname, I couldn’t remember. It took her to remind me what it was. With nothing more than a few stiff jabs, and a few glancing blows off the headgear, I couldn’t remember my favorite cousin’s nickname. She told my mom, who put an end to all that. You can imagine the sustained damage of years of that pounding….
July 30th, 2019 at 6:44PM
charlie: This is, first of all, really nicely written — beginning of a great short story.
I seem to recall you did play some reasonably serious sports in hs or college? Less head bashing, I assume…
July 30th, 2019 at 8:14PM
UD, yes, you’re right, I did participate in sports year round. Football, basketball, and track. My dad was All City baseball at Roosevelt HS in Boyle Heights, CA, and went on to play for UCLA. My maternal uncles were footbal and baseball players at Saint Ignatius High in San Francisco. Uncle Herman played for the Chicago Cubs minor league team located on Catalina Island, CA. I was going to be an athlete, or it was going to be a wee bit chilly during the holidays.
For my dad and uncle’s generation, boxing was a major pastime. It wasn’t unusual for boys of that era to participate in that sport. My father/uncles believed, with good reason, that if you could deal with what boxing demanded, every other sport would be far easier. They were right, but mom didn’t care. It was hard enough for her with all the contusions, sprains, and dislocations that I was already enduring, she wasn’t going to deal with a slightly punchy teenager, as well. And she was NOT happy that college recruiters were angling for me to continue football into college. God bless her, she couldn’t care less about sports, and as it worked out, because of a, ahh, disagreement with a teacher my senior year of high school, all athletic scholarship offers were rescinded. So, I went to University of San Francisco and was a walk on basketball player for a year. Mom always knew best…