An hilariously well-written piece about award-winning new dorms in London.
An hilariously well-written piece about award-winning new dorms in London.
More good news for Penn State.
You go, Minot State!
The school also paid $6,900 to send an administrator to a week-long course at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; 15 months later, the employee took unpaid leave and then retired, the report said.
… and an illiterate local press. What can you say?
Only that things are great: Southern University “continues to move in a positive direction.”
… the only university UD has characterized as well on its way toward becoming a faculty-free sports factory, has now been officially ranked as just about the most embarrassing sports school in America.
UD thanks David, a reader, for sending her the Grid of Shame, which of course ranks Penn State the very lowest, but which places Marshall only slighter higher.
Colm Tóibín remembers him.
UD writes about one of his poems here.
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Heaney’s charming translation of a ninth century Irish poem reminds UD of Auden’s translation of the poem, set to music by Samuel Barber.
The Jewish Daily Forward, which broke the Yeshiva University sex abuse story, is rightly disgusted by that school’s paltry response to the absolutely damning independent report about decades of disgusting behavior by that university’s rabbis and administrators.
Yeshiva’s punishment is – however much that institution tries to avoid it – inescapable. With fewer and fewer people applying to the school, and with its credit rating in the toilet, Yeshiva is certainly going to remain historic; but it will, in not too long a time, cease to be at all important. Between Madoff and Macy, it has sealed its fate. No smart, self-respecting person wants to go there.
But everybody can easily afford it. It’s like when you make Glaxo pay out three billion. No biggie.
How bizarre to find this sentence in a review of a new book about big-time university football. The reviewer recounts (and the book recounts) a routinely sordid chapter in the life of a routinely sordid sports whore – the University of Tennessee – and then the reviewer suddenly offers that phrase: unbecoming of a university.
UD was pulled up short by it, since never in her long athletics-blogging life has it occurred to her to consider more than a handful of the sports factories about which she writes universities. She doesn’t write about them because they are universities. She writes about them because they are illegitimate recipients of state and federal tax dollars and tax breaks because someone thinks they are universities. She writes about them because maybe if enough people realize they are not universities they will be shut down and we won’t have to keep paying for them.
I guess they get “green” points too – being driven a few blocks in a stretch Hummer.
… has responded to the lawsuit against Trump University…
Meanwhile, David Halperin points out that TU is just one of many for-profit schools for scandal in the United States.
While none of the major predatory for-profit college companies — University of Phoenix, EDMC, Corinthian, Kaplan, CEC, etc. — have a frontman as publicly odious as Donald Trump, their abuses and harms go much deeper than those of Trump University.
That’s because they’ve entrapped far more people, and because our taxes continue to pay for them.
… featured a smart classroom in which you write on the walls! Dat’s right – no black or white board — just take the marker on the podium and scrawl all over the walls! What’ll they think of next.
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