Which is The Onion and Which is Not?

Woman In Burqa Condemns Woman in Chador

Burqa-Wearing Islamic Preacher Slams Muslim Women for Wearing Hijabs

I make twelve million dollars a year. You walk by my monument every day. I am your liege. And yet you fail to swear fealty to me.

It is because you are so entitled.

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

It’s an age-old problem, and it’s hitting, of all places, ‘bama. The smarter your students, the less likely they are to do something as stupid as go to a football game.

So, you know, you make the argument that football deserves all this revenue cuz it’s going to make the school so much better, and in ‘bama’s case it does. It does make the school better. Much smarter students have been enrolling.

However: The fewer your drunken dipshits, the emptier your seats; and ‘bama’s student section is emptying out, man. Big-time.

I believe the pertinent phrase is victim of your own success. Hoist by your own petard.

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

You know it’s getting really bad when the local press starts trying to educate ‘bama students in how to be fans.

[I]f Alabama fans really wanted to help create a home-field advantage inside Bryant-Denny Stadium on Saturday, then they wouldn’t drink (too much) alcohol before the game.

Most Alabama fans don’t know what it’s like to go four quarters in the heat, but it’s tough work. It’s a process, and that process starts long before game time. Look, it’s going to be dangerously hot on Saturday. Don’t be that fan passing out in the fourth quarter. Be safe. Drink something other than Pappy’s whiskey.

These instructions might be meaningful to the great-grandchildren of tenant farmers; I doubt out-of-state merit scholars looking for low tuition will make much sense of instructions about game attendance that involve fine-tuning your alcoholism so that you can withstand hours of torturous heat.

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

Tsar Nicky’s anger with his subjects grows with each game. Eventually he will order a random group of non-ticket-holders lined up at the very top of the stadium and shot so as to fall ever so slowly all the way down to his statue. The rest of the students will get the message.

‘Professor Feiner insists this was not meant to be a partisan exercise. She says if students wanting to support the nomination wanted to enroll in the course and take the trip, they would have been welcome. “’

Nice try, babe.

Well, that’s refreshing.

Instead of lying through his teeth about it forever, Jerome Allen has decided to admit that he took mucho money and goodies from stinky Philip Esformes to lie about the basketball skills of stinky’s son so the son could get admitted to U Penn. Once safely at Penn, the kid’s lack of basketball skills immediately rendered him useless to the team; but meanwhile, there he was, at Penn.

He’s a senior now, and, the story of his fraudulent admission having broken, is maybe embarrassed. But when your father’s about to go on trial for the largest welfare fraud in history, his having bought your admission to college probably doesn’t loom that large.

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

Penn’s own coverage worries about “a confirmed instance where bribery benefitted a student’s admission into the University.”

The New York Times links to my blog.

In my friend Barney’s obit, the writer, Benedict Carey, not only mentions UD, but links to her.

UD is delighted.

Structurally unsound canapés

Where UD learned her manners.

It’s too maddening.

You know UD‘s obsession with oreo cows; you know that, bizarrely, oreo cows now live right next door to our upstate NY house. They’re part of this elegant new outfit down the street.

Now UD‘s sister-in-law, currently in residence, sends her photos of the cows having wandered out of their enclosures and DIRECTLY ONTO our front field. She has AWAKENED to a herd of oreo cows at her door.

I’m so fucking jealous.

‘Khosla is a member of the board of trustees of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley.’

Vinod Khosla’s Wikipedia page still says he’s a trustee of a very high-profile outfit committed to fighting global poverty; but in fact his name disappeared from this page not long ago; and UD‘s thinking it’s maybe cuz a filthy rich stinker who goes all the way to the Supreme Court to keep people off a public beach is … not a good look for the Blum Center…

I’m seeing public presentations to the globally poor in which representatives from the Blum Center say Our trustees include a billionaire who has never spent a night at his colossal coastal property in California and in fact doesn’t like the beach but decided he wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars clearing out the place, posting armed guards, and pressing his case to keep doing that up to the Supreme Court. We feel your pain.

University of Oklahoma Prayer

Twas Adam’s fall that brought McCall
Unto the plains; unto the law.
Forgive us, pray
We lost our way
O Lord! Forgiveth all.

‘We hope this will give people—especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice—a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, “No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.”’

Well, good luck with that; your Grievance Studies hoax (aka Daughter of Sokal), just now disclosed, will get plenty of attention, etc.

It might even help people understand how scandals like Avital Ronell happen.

But although the hoaxes keep coming, and although America’s best minds – Richard Rorty, for one – have for decades warned us about the deadly combination of hypertheory and political correctness —

When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ‘problematizing familiar concepts.’

Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.

— no one seems able to find their way out of the fog.

“It’s time for India to join the list.”

[T]he burqa has already been banned in some form or another in several countries of Western Europe, such as France, Belgium and Austria. The Netherlands and Denmark are the two latest countries to place a ban on the burqa. Bans in various forms, such as bans on burqas in schools and colleges, or other public places or in certain jurisdictions, are also in place in Germany and Norway.

All of these are democratic and technologically advanced countries as well as free societies with high levels of gender equality. The … Freedom House report ranks Norway as the freest country in the whole world, with a perfect score of 100/100. The Netherlands, with a score of 99/100, comes second.

Ban it in India.

When you get old enough to need to install…

… a bar in the shower.

‘I’ve spent my whole adult life in rarefied academic circles, where everyone has a good income and excellent working conditions. Yet I know many people in that world who are seething with resentment because they aren’t at Harvard or Yale, or who actually are at Harvard or Yale but are seething all the same because they haven’t received a Nobel Prize.’

SING IT.

Welcome to my world
Won’t you come on in?
Ivies and Nobels
Are there for me to win

Step into my heart
Leave your cares behind
Welcome to my world
Built with me in mind

Knock and all doors will open
Seek and I will find
Ask and I’ll be given
The key to this world of mine

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

Seething all the same
A hedgie lives next door
See how they rig the game
He makes ten million more

Krugman’s in the Times
Every week or two
I am far behind
In the Chronicle‘s The View

Ivy? Sure. Cornell.
But it’s rated last.
Life’s a living hell
My rage is unsurpassed

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

Related:

[T]he eliter-than-elite kids [at Ivy League schools] themselves help create a provisional inside-the-Ivy hierarchy that lets all the other privileged kids, the ones who are merely upper-upper middle class, feel the spur of resentment and ambition that keeps us running, keeps us competing, keeps us sharp and awful in all the ways that meritocracy requires.

Il était encore …

en vie??

*********

She.

Separated at Birth:

Kafka.

And Rooney Mara.

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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.
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