January 4th, 2018
Our Rod and His Staff they Comfort Me.

1 Rich Rod is our shepherd; we shall not want.

2 He maketh us to lie to his wife: he leadeth us to his erection.

3 He bribeth our staff: he leadeth us to the path of visually enhanced underwear for his cock’s sake.

4 Yea, though we plead for jobs in other departments, we will get no response: for “Coach Rodriguez would be pissed.”

5 Our school preparest six million dollars for him to go away; yea, he will take the money and sue us for forty million more.

6 Surely his woman-beating players will follow us all the days of our life: and we will dwell in the house of The Rod for ever.

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

UD thanks David and John.

No comments | Posted January 4, 2018 10:22AM by Margaret Soltan | [email protected]
Categories: forms of religious experience, sport
January 3rd, 2018
New Year: Finally Going Through David’s Books.

Eve Sedgwick’s devoted brother, my old boyfriend and friend, died seven years ago at the age of 57.

The turn of the year decided me to go to the basement where, over a decade ago, he asked us to store boxes of his books, tapes, clothing, and papers. Time to deal with the books.

I’d already gone through the papers, and sent Eve’s letters and photographs on to her widower, Hal, in New York City; I’d already given David’s clothes to Goodwill. The tightly taped and roped boxes of books, however, daunted me – their physical and emotional weight sat in a dark corner, fit to burst.

Yesterday, out under a winter sky, the sun piercingly clear, I watched a red fox slip across our yard and take the small hill up to our neighbor’s, and this somehow sealed the deal: I’d go down with a sharp pair of scissors and cut the ropes and shelve the books.

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

Not everything was a book. There
was a colorful, wonderful, untouched
Indonesian journal, in which I’ll
write lecture notes for this
semester’s classes.

There were 36 Heroes of the
Blues cards.

David’s mother inscribed a copy
of Orwell’s writings to him.

A Straussian in his teens, David
held on to this 1967 pamphlet.

At the end of the copy of A Dialogue
on Love that his sister gave him, she writes:

It never seems sensible to pass along moral injunctions.
I sometimes think that beyond the Golden Rule,

the only one that matters is this:
If you can
be happy, you should.

No comments | Posted January 3, 2018 11:52AM by Margaret Soltan | [email protected]
Categories: snapshots from home
January 2nd, 2018
Sentences that make UD laugh.

An animal study that I wrote about in July, for instance, found that frail, elderly mice were capable of completing brief spurts of high-intensity running on little treadmills, if the treadmill’s pace were adjusted to each mouse’s individual fitness level.

1 Comment | Posted January 2, 2018 11:36AM by Margaret Soltan | [email protected]
Categories: sentences that make UD laugh
January 1st, 2018
New Year Greetings from Scathing Online Schoolmarm, who reminds you…

… that great writing is mysterious and rare and always worth revisiting.

This is Jan Morris, fifty years ago, describing La Paz at night.

The scene is shadowy and cluttered, and you cannot always make out the detail as you push through the crowd; but the impression it leaves is one of ceaseless, tireless energy, a blur of strange faces and sinewy limbs, a haze of ill-understood intentions, a laugh from a small Mongol in dungarees, a sudden stink from an open drain, a cavalcade of tilted bowlers in the candlelight — and above it all, so clear, so close that you confuse the galaxies with the street lamps, the wide blue bowl of the Bolivian sky and the brilliant cloudless stars of the south.

3 Comments | Posted January 1, 2018 8:42PM by Margaret Soltan | [email protected]
Categories: Scathing Online Schoolmarm
January 1st, 2018
Post-New Year’s Bacchanalia

4 Comments | Posted January 1, 2018 12:06PM by Margaret Soltan | [email protected]
Categories: snapshots from home
January 1st, 2018
‘Others within higher education have said the government should be promoting life-saving research and financial aid, rather than athletic departments and their coaches’ salaries of as much as $5 million.’

Puh-leeze. Get with the program. Nine coaches make over five million. Saban makes eleven million.

No comments | Posted January 1, 2018 10:44AM by Margaret Soltan | [email protected]
Categories: sport
January 1st, 2018
Quoting Mr UD on New Year’s Day.

“Since 1009 is a prime number, there are only four numbers that divide 2018: 1, 2, 1009, and 2018.”

1 Comment | Posted January 1, 2018 12:57AM by Margaret Soltan | [email protected]
Categories: snapshots from home
January 1st, 2018
New Year: From Delmore Schwartz, “In the Green Morning, Now, Once More”

The merry, the musical,
The jolly, the magical,
The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival
Suddenly ended
As the sky descended
But there was only the feeling,
In all the dark falling,
Of fragrance and of freshness, of birth and beginning.

No comments | Posted January 1, 2018 12:15AM by Margaret Soltan | [email protected]
Categories: poem
« Previous Page

UD REVIEWED

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

Archives

Categories