University Diaries » “The children were taught the government and social systems would collapse.”

”The parents had several guns, including an AR-15 rifle, that were stored unsecured.”

Cuz you never know when the final battle’s gonna blow, so you need the big artillery at the ready.

*************

But, see, guns are many things. Aren’t they? Your paranoid parents see them as apocalypse-busters; you, not so much. As you get more and more pissed with ma and pa, you eye the family arsenal with affection, for therein lies your revenge for the disciplinary shit the folks dish out.

Maybe to a non-15 year old, slaughtering the whole family seems excessive, but presumably the thinking here is that once you’ve reduced your primary targets to shuddering humps of blood, you’ll need to deal with four hysterical children running around shrieking while one of them calls the police or runs to the neighbors. They’ll have to go too, which means that you create a scene every bit as apocalyptic as your parents predicted.

I mean, they had in mind government and social, while you meant domestic, but the result, as far as your parents went, was the same: the sudden bloody shutting down of their entire world.

*************

As for what the legal system representing by far the world’s most gunned-up location will do with an unstable kid who plucks an unsecured household annihilator and does a doomsday… Well, it’s a slow process. Two years after he did his thing, the courts are just beginning formal proceedings. Should he be tried as an adult? That’s the latest, and UD assumes the answer will be yes. But what does she know.

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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.
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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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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...
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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...
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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.
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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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