University Diaries » ‘The email also asks the Zuckerbergs to, “ideally stop—but at a minimum give us extended breaks from—the acquisition, demolition and construction cycle to let the neighborhood recover from the last eight years of disruption.”’

This blog has long chronicled one of the most notorious pathologies of billionaires — the compulsion to generate perpetual domestic construction noise. Infinite implosion, enlargement, elaboration, further enlargement, and finally reimplosion as the results fail to satisfy, or as the municipality makes the billionaire take it all down because he was too arrogant to get permits… Then the lengthy lawsuits resulting in further, somewhat amended, construction, deconstruction, reconstruction, deconstruction…

Imagine having spent a lot of money to live in a classy discreet Manhattan co-op only to discover that the hedgie next door is deep into a lifelong wall-explosion frenzy. Imagine (see my headline) living on Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto street and trying to deal not only with endless thundering construction zones but daily traffic from his illegal personal Montessori school, as well as from his restlessly coming and going non-specific serf-army. “Frankly I’m not sure what’s going on,” one neighbor said…“Except for noise and construction debris.”

Building private institutions (schools, churches, synagogues, and health clinics are popular) is another billionaire pathology, part of the paranoid journey whereby withdrawal from the public world into a hypersecure fully equipped private world completes itself.

The incoming mayor of a metropolitan area rife with billionaires and close-to-billionaires won big in the last election in part because billionaires have made themselves detestable. If Andrew Cuomo thought he could turn things around by taking gobs of money from … billionaires, he was a real idiot for thinking so.

We could spend time, I guess, analyzing the root causes of the two behaviors that make everyone who shares their world hate billionaires – total withdrawal from the public realm without the decency to shut up about it. The rest of us must hear and witness the cacophony of their world-contempt, their mad, haughty, removal from humanity. Howard Hughes had nothing on these guys. But he in his day was a one-off. In places like NY and CA they constitute a society – a loud, rule-flouting, society, for whom what lies outside the wall implosions exists to be ignored or exploited.

For all its seeming withdrawal, the ethos is one, obviously, of naked aggression.

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=82001

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

[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

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Archives

Categories