On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.
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My title comes from this poem.
McCarrick, Wuerl, and … just… wow… So at least the Catholic church in DC has decided that one of its university’s deans shouldn’t get a pass when he writes this:
[Julie] Swetnick is 55 y/o. Kavanaugh is 52 y/o. Since when do senior girls hang with freshmen boys? If it happened when Kavanaugh was a senior, Swetnick was an adult drinking with&by her admission, having sex with underage boys. In another universe, he would be victim & she the perp!
In another universe, Chilean priests and monks wouldn’t “[create] their own sick sign language to command the deaf and mute boys to perform oral sex and be sodomized.” Maybe CU’s social justice dean should direct his attention to that.
… for Montgomery County Executive.
When Nancy was merely the mayor of Garrett Park, Maryland, UD wrote about her for the town’s paper, The Bugle.
Latest GP news, by the way:
Eileen [Kelly’s] very large Japanese Zelkova tree … has now been certified as the largest one in the country.
Beautiful weather, a low cost of living and gorgeous natural surroundings haven’t stopped Louisiana’s capital city from making it big in the world of crime and murder. Baton Rouge has outdone the rest of the state, which is [itself] 40 percent more violent than the nation as a whole. New Orleans is more popular, so Baton Rouge seized the opportunity to top the violent crime list. Baton Rouge isn’t a very large city, but it manages to attract attention by having 49 murders annually. If you have a death wish, it’s a great destination.
Why would you send your kid to school there?
… sex dolls, the composer of the immortal Plastic Fantastic Lover has died.
Yes, American university football made it for one week without any criminal behavior. This may be a record.
But all good things must come to an end, and one of Penn State’s most revered players stole a bike and then dumped it because “he did not feel like walking back to his residence building that day.”
Since this is simply the sort of thing you do when you are King of the Campus, locals doubt he will suffer any consequences.
Not easy to do, but this New York Times writer manages it.
Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, … this scandal has given us an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be.
… His story shows, in lurid microcosm, how a certain class of men guard and perpetuate their privileges. Women who struggle ceaselessly to be smart enough, attractive enough, ambitious enough and likable enough have been playing a rigged game. As they realize that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does.
Best headline today.
On Sunday, [a Yale student] wrote on Twitter that it’s easy to forget, in an “insular” place such as Yale, that, when students who behave badly graduate, “they don’t disappear but instead become part of the fabric of society, & a certain type ascends & ascends.” It’s “been unbearable at times to watch men I know have hurt my friends ascend within clubs to leadership,” she continued, adding, “How will we feel seeing which of them rise in their fields, our fields, invincible & untouchable?”
There’s a reason they call it predatory capitalism, babe.
Read and learn.
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You want more on predatory?
Pure. Animal. Kingdom.
I witnessed efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh and others to “target” particular girls so they could be taken advantage of; it was usually a girl that was especially vulnerable because she was alone at the party or shy.
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Even when they become a global laughingstock, there’s always a faithful retainer to tell them otherwise.
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