The mayor is “utterly shocked” you can’t go to high school in Bellaire without risking a fatal gunshot wound. But what does Don’t Mess With Texas mean? It’s means Texas has more registered guns than anyplace else in America.
And hyuk! That’s just registered guns!
What I’m trying to say is Texas has a lot of guns and Texas is always talking about guns and showing off guns and taking guns to church and all and how utterly shocking that the state is one big ol’ shootout.
Not that Iran cares about so many of its women – including a high-profile Olympics champ, who has defected to the Netherlands – very militantly casting off compulsory veiling. Put them in jail if they’re here; ignore them if they’re there… But swaddled masses yearning to breathe free can prove quite pesky if they’re truly able to… mass. We shall see. Indications are excellent. Even in places you’d never expect it.
… seeks a path to affirmation. Schubert’s meditations on death, in the last piano sonata, D960, the slow movement of the String Quintet in C, D956, and the incomparable String Quartet in G major, D887, are among the profoundest testimonies in art to the beauty of life and the pain of losing it; they are also true gestures of acceptance – since that which is accepted is neither sentimentalized nor set aside, but confronted in all its unspeakable darkness.”
*****************
[A] man of extraordinary intellect, learning and humour, a great supporter of central European dissidents, and the kind of provocative – sometimes outrageous – conservative thinker that a truly liberal society should be glad to have challenging it. Timothy Garton Ash
… on the crisis Ross Douthat is writing about here, go here. UD said quite the same thing fifteen years ago.
And by the way. Read the post directly under this one, which has to do with a crisis in another discipline – psychiatry – and you’ll see that the same principle is in play, whether the field in tatters is English studies or psychiatry. If you lack any agreement about the specific set of things you are collectively studying, and about how to use and value those things, your discipline is going to expand and expand until it explodes. A late-stage, pre-eruptive sign is that your discipline is increasingly taken over by amoral political actors. Note that responsible psychiatrists are indeed trying to respond to Bandy Lee (and by extension Justin Frank and other ideologues) by reasserting the discipline boundaries and ethical rules of psychiatry.
Specifically: You do not abuse the integrity and credibility of your profession by weaponizing it against people and ideas you hate.
UD once sat on a committee, at George Washington University, with a colleague from psychiatry who, whenever it was his turn to talk, mainly recited his cv. I got this award; I’m noted around the world for that… We all stared at each other and shifted uncomfortably when he spoke…
Regan Books published this man’s masterwork, Bush on the Couch, an idiotic psychoanalysis of George W Bush (UD, a deep-blue democrat, has nothing good to say about that president, but knows a hatchet job when she sees one). Discerning readers from Fidel Castro to some LaRouchie loved the book and it’s become an instant classic among people who couldn’t give a shit about the Goldwater Rule (you’re not supposed to psychoanalyze people you’ve never even met, let alone exchanged two words with). In her naivete, UD thought she’d seen the end of this hugely embarrassing genre.
Now another president UD can’t stand – the current one – is on the receiving end of a far more insidious psychiatrists’ campaign, one that – as Jeffrey Lieberman points out – does significant damage to a discipline whose scientific status – with people like UD‘s colleague around – is already mighty shaky. Led by Yale’s Bandy X. Lee, a bunch of psychiatrists published a … multivariate? … psychoanalysis of Trump, with Lee insisting he’s so nuts he has to be butterfly netted or the world will come to an end. As Andrew O’Hehir puts it, in Lee’s “strand of the multiverse, Trump is heading for a catastrophic health crisis or … an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, and we won’t have to worry about defeating him in the November election because he’ll be dead or on a ventilator or shouting at the walls in a padded room.”
Amy Barnhorst, a UC Davis psychiatrist who works with people who really do need involuntary psychiatric holds, comments:
I think it’s a really bad way to go. It’s not just inappropriate and would be really ineffective, but I think it’s very damaging to our profession and the patients we take care of to suggest something like that.
A mental health hold is a very delicate tool that we use for people who very badly need treatment but aren’t able to accept that treatment. It’s not something that should be thrown around as a punishment for your enemies.
… Surgeons don’t go around lopping off the feet of their enemy in order to debilitate them. We shouldn’t go around applying mental health holds to people we don’t like in order to debilitate them.
A writer at WBUR, a person with mental health problems, amplifies her point:
Lee’s comments are … disturbing because they paint with such a broad brush. Like Trump’s insults being parroted by his followers in everyday conversation, it is easy to take Lee’s words and swing them in any direction, not just at Trump.
What is astonishing is the degree to which we embrace this kind of [thing]. We seem unable to accept the idea that the president’s behavior is not abnormal even if it is abhorrent.
Indeed, Lee does seem rather in the line of the notorious Soviet psychiatric establishment, swinging damaging charges of mental illness in any direction.
And there’s some sort of mondo bizarro logic in her having now swung directly into the tortured path of none other than Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz has sent a formal complaint to Yale about her, because she called him nuts too. In response to Dersh, she’s gone full Joan of Arc and I tell you, mes petites! It’s a mad mad mad mad world.
… this New York Times editorial. “Prince Harry and Meghan should not be lamented as defectors from the old order, but celebrated as the heroes of the next installment, as modern royals renouncing some level of privilege to seek their fortune in the real world,” the NYT writes; and it’s as Katherine Anne Porter says in her great short story, “Holiday”:
[A]ll my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness. … I learned finally [to] take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. … We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours… and if we don’t run from the others, we are fools.
Whatever becomes of these two, their story so far is about the guts and clarity to free oneself from a destructive life narrative that someone else has laid out for you. But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king, says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, as he taps his head. Mind-forg’d manacles are no joke, okay? Imagine how powerful they are when they’re royal. Nothing wrong, UD thinks, with being led to some extent in your life by the title of Graham Greene’s memoir: Ways of Escape.
Why muddy the beautiful simplicity of this exchange with classes, exams, etc. etc.? The never-ending, burdensome business of school attendance, paper writing, research — why not cut to the chase and do a win-win? Students get university degrees, faculty/staff get paid and everybody keeps their trap shut about it. Da? Duh!
Naturally any conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people is going to be a little … permeabil...
The prosecutors … recorded the pro-rector as he received large bags, bottles, and envelopes. Besides money, the bribes offered by students’ parents also included meat, wine, and spirits.
Bottles, wine, spirits… Getting a sense of Romania’s largest unit of currency here…
I felt – as I so often do at that particular point – deep emotion, a heart-stopping sense of the beauty of the piece and the pathos of us all. Not sure why this transition gobsmacks me. I suspect it’s because the conversation the fugue establishes has an emotional break here. Here we’re not just dancing back and forth with one another, with ourself. Here we are letting the tears flow. Post-Bach, a walk with the dog through new parts of our forest, where we stumbled on a deer skull.
They all go into the fraud, The double dippers, the conflicted, the bogus guest speakers, The whorish expert witnesses, the whorish corporate board sitters, The twisters of research results to benefit their corporate masters, The creators of bogus companies into which to deposit federal grant money, They all go into the fraud…
To paraphrase T.S. Eliot. And as we enter a new decade, it’s good to remind ourselves just how rampant these and other forms of academic fraud are, especially in our medical, law, engineering, and business schools.
How rampant? So rampant that ProPublica has just released a helpful “reporting recipe,” a lengthy checklist of types of professorial corruption, and how you can discover/report them.
Double dipper Akhilesh Reddy, to take the latest instance, simply “did not notice” that two different universities were simultaneously paying him large salaries. And who can deny that overlooking large sources of funds from large institutions is something of which all of us are capable?
Sensing that this claim might not convince everyone, Reddy moved on to the what a tangled web we weave phase of his explanation.
The neurologist and researcher gave inconsistent statements about the money, claiming he only noticed the salary issue when he checked his account in February 2016, five months after starting at UCL, the tribunal heard… He said he thought the universities were “sharing his salary”, that there was an “overlap” in his salaries and also that he thought the large sum was just his salary from UCL... Prof Reddy said he thought “all necessary people were fully aware of the position.”
Before he could add that his dog ate his homework, the tribunal suspended him from medical practice. He has left England and moved to Pennsylvania, cuz there’s always another sucker.
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
