… has ruled that ISIS propagandist Hoda Muthana is not an American citizen and can’t come back here? The New York Times, which runs a Pietà image of her with her child, calls it a “surprise ruling,” but if you read this blog you’re not surprised. There’s reasonably compelling evidence, in this case, that as the daughter of a Yemeni diplomat she never held actual American citizenship.
[Judge Reggie] Walton expressed sympathy for [Muthana’s father], but he ruled that there was enough evidence that Hoda Muthana was born while her father still had diplomatic status…
Assuming she can obtain Yemeni citizenship, she will be much happier there, because, just like ISIS, they still have slaves in that country.
“It was shocking how tight he was going to be in retirement,” Cooperman said… “I’m just saying that it’s not an impressive amount of capital for two people that were leading physicians for their entire work life,” Cooperman went on. “You know, I lost more today than they spent a lifetime accumulating.”
Just to get you situated pronto in le monde Léon, if I may, where ten million dollars is a shocking shortfall, a humiliating failure, and an opportunity to shoot one’s mouth off about one’s own incomparable booty… Did bribery help Leon? Did insider trading (he had to pay a five million dollar fine to make the SEC go away in that one) help Leon? Is it fair for him to compare himself to two sadly fraud-challenged physicians who probably didn’t even engage in theft of medicaid funds?
In the political realm, Leon loves to bat designated-belligerent-billionaire-hitter. He hit one out of the park with Obama – said he never worked a day in his life; said he was just like Hitler! And now he’s taking a big ol’ swing at Elizabeth Warren, who had the temerity to remind people that he had to settle that big ol’ insider trading charge (this was long after he settled the bribery charge). (Why did he settle the insider trading charge? He said he was going to fight it.)
[Cooperman called] Warren “disgraceful” in an interview with CNBC. “She doesn’t know who the f— she’s tweeting. I gave away more in the year than she has in her whole f—-ing lifetime,” Cooperman continued. Cooperman also said he “won” his case involving insider trading, though he actually just settled it with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Someone should write an essay about that favorite word of the rogue: DISGRACEFUL. DISGRACEFUL. DEEZGRAITZFOOLLLL. The president, Giuliani, Dershowitz – all of our country’s highest-profile, most wretched rogues, use it all the time. Such a prim prissy word – the sort of thing you associate with Margaret Dumont – and yet all these guys – who are clearly Groucho Marx in the matter – are doing her. They’re doing Dumont! Why, I never! Really! There are certain conventions!
How do you solve a problem like McMansions? Cavernous shells impossible to sell? Rent them all out for huge illegal parties Making the life of those around them hell
Price is eight hundred daily for the trashing Don't give a thought to local rules and regs Jam all the folks and weaponry you want to Plenty of room for super jumbo kegs
Everyone lies, the owner and the renter Neighbors complain but town officials suck: "We won't do shit, but here's a little wisdom: When bullets start flying the best thing to do is duck."
A blog like this one, which features a much-used category titled Beware the B-School Boys, welcomes a bunch of new books with titles like Nothing Succeeds like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools and Leadership BS. Also a bunch of new opinion pieces with titles like We Should Bulldoze the Business School. Very nice.
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UPDATE: Right on cue. A perfectly timed news item on the subject just broke, and it’s being widely covered for all the wrong reasons. Everyone’s hyperventilating about a photogenic go-getter abundantly and shamelessly lying her way into a high-profile job in the current… troubled federal government. Said she went to schools she didn’t go to. Bought her degree from a diploma mill. (Read this page while you can.)
But as you know if you read this blog in its infant days, diploma mills (see that UD category) are a permanent structural reality of all countries. It’s a quirk of the United States that when people here find out you bought your college or graduate degree they actually get upset and do something about it. Most countries don’t care. This is why you want to wait til you get back to the States for that surgery.
So the fact that Mina Chang is a diploma mill grad who claims on her cv to have graduated from Harvard is a ho-hum revelation. Generous chunks of the military, fire departments, and public education are all milled up. Why those locations in particular? Because if you demand an advanced degree for job advancement, people will, er, advance them.
No: The real story lies here:
According to her educational history on LinkedIn, Chang writes that she took part in an “Executive Nonprofit Leadership” program at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
The Non Profit Leadership Certificate Program is a six-day program with a $900 fee.
That’s right, kiddies: Leadership BS at nine hundred (with travel, etc. let’s make it an even thousand) for SIX DAYS. Can you imagine the amazing leadership bs you’re getting for that moolah? Reminds ol’ UD of this 2011 six day New Zealand bs leadership seminar (run by a diploma mill grad – beginning to see the synergy?) that cost around $13,000 dollars in American currency. Or, closer to home, there’s this (quoting meself in a 2010 post about leadership bs seminars paid for by the federal government):
The Center for Creative Leadership doesn’t just have a great name. It’s located on ONE LEADERSHIP PLACE, Greensboro, North Carolina. Its street is a leader. This alone perhaps warrants a certain premium for leadership trainees who, even as their rented cars pull up to CCL headquarters, can sense that the very ground upon which they motor is imbued with leadership.
A five-day leadership course at the CCL will cost you between $6200 and $10,600.
And that’s not all, folks! Here’s another example of your tax dollars at work, again from a 2010 post:
As Michael Kinsley once wrote, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal. That a hyper-ambitious young person would survey Trump University World and come to certain conclusions is no scandal. That the federal government enables, and schools like Harvard exploit, the leadership racket is, if you ask UD, scandalous.
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Oh, whoops. Forgot the big shocking news item about Chang and that leadership program. Shockingly, she didn’t really attend it. Shockingly, she listed it on her resume but actually did not attend.
UD finds this admirable. I ain’t saying I’d hire the woman! But she definitely shows good sense here.
UD is sure Abe Ravelstein/Allan Bloom is right about this; he might even be right about this: “All educated people make the same mistake – they think that nature and solitude are good for them. Nature and solitude are poison.” But what the hey. Here’s another picture, now that I’m back in ‘thesda, from my beloved Rehoboth in autumn.
The thing about the beach off-season is that there’s almost nothing there. It’s as though someone systematically removed everything from the world. Standing on the beach, you certainly sense a world hunched up behind you; but it’s well behind you, and you can’t hear it over the waves.
The place has been, for decades, a perfect shitstorm. You name what’s wrong with American universities, and it’s super-wrong with SDSU. Overpaid presidents? SDSU’s last non-interim president was so greedy an outraged state legislature and outraged citizens forced the SDSU trustees to make some changes. Bankrupting themselves through sports? An earlier president seems to have spent his entire term throwing all of the school’s money at a football team that played to empty stadiums. Homicidal fraternities?
Ah. Homicidal fraternities. Ever since an arsenal of big guns and a cache of big drugs were discovered at its frats (six were involved in a 2008 conspiracy so extensive and professional as to draw the involvement of the DEA) SDSU has held the distinction of being the site of one of our nation’s largest college drug busts. The conspiracy began to fall apart with the death of a student from a cocaine overdose…
… Which might explain why yesterday, in the wake of another frat-related death – he was a wee freshman who’d just gotten there – SDSU has done something less homicidal schools don’t do after each of their after all pretty routine frat drinking deaths: It has suspended fourteen fraternities.
I mean, fraternities being what they are, a bunch of them at SDSU were already being, er, scrutinized for the distant possibility that something untoward might be happening at them… But now! I mean, if you’re going to start killing nineteen year olds weeks after we’ve taken them from their parents and invited them to come here and study I mean, really!
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UPDATE: Suspension: It’s in the air! Washington State University – another ridiculous sports-obsessed school – has also decided that their frats are getting a little much.
His father’s youth wing forced him off the stage last night when the author of Triggered began a book-promotion appearance by announcing he wouldn’t take any questions/comments.
Why did this seemingly routine announcement (lots of speakers opt not to do Q/A), um, trigger the most ardent supporters of America’s Genius of the Carpathians to attack his son and his son’s very Elena Ceausescu partner (she instructed the assembly that “You’re not making your parents proud by being rude and disruptive.”)?
Well, “We wanted to ask questions about immigration and about Christianity, but they didn’t want to face those questions.” No kidding. If you thought John McCain had a hard time handling a voter who told him Obama was an Arab, imagine fielding Since America was uniquely created by Jesus Christ, who was white, why do we accept non-white immigrants?
At 81, Harvard’s highest-profile emeritus has chosen to close out his life anticly and frantically suing everyone in sight. And in return getting sued.
Like his doubles in desuetude, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, he has long been a naughty boy, a game-player, a rule-breaker, and he intends to go down swinging as the rule of law catches up with him. But as he is very old, his punches aren’t landing. He and his doubles are hollow men.
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless
Observers try to capture the convoluted farce Alan Dershowitz has made of his life:
[E]very argument he makes creates even worse fallout: Don’t just deny… demand they sue you! Then get sued. Don’t just litigate the case… get [David] Boies kicked off! End up facing [brilliant litigator] Chuck Cooper. Don’t just claim [Virginia] Giuffre’s mistaken [about your sexual crimes]… accuse Boies of blackmailing you! Get sued by Boies.
He might have quietly settled various cases against him; he might have retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, as the lights dimmed, with a little dignity. Instead, this bizarre American figure, this deflated pop-up doll, keeps trying to pop. We cannot help watching him. And his doubles.
Here we go round the prickly pricks Prickly pricks prickly pricks Here we go round the prickly pricks At five o’clock in the morning.
[Alan Dershowitz claims that one of his friend Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex slaves has] “caused him severe emotional distress, including ‘cardiac conditions.’”
All sorts of direct witnesses apparently told then-assistant OSU wrestling coach Jordan that the team doctor was raping student wrestlers. Yeah, we know; it is what it is, he is reported to have said to the complainants. If you can shrug at a doctor masturbating in front of one of your referees in the locker room shower, you can shrug at anything.
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
