How do you get a decade-long suspension?
Michigan State is not inclined to say.
What did you do to get that long a sanction?
A murder or two? Fraternity rape? Gun play?
Maybe you hazed your freshmen til you killed them.
Made them drink gin until they passed away.
Maybe you bashed their heads in til concussion.
With hazing there's just so very many ways!
Like the therapist/rapist, this one involves sexual crimes; but here there seems to have been a concerted effort to hide the fact that a principal stands charged with multiple rapes of a minor — one of the students in her school!
Not a peep out of anyone in the system for years; but then a reporter found
… a thin manila folder in the basement of the New Castle County Courthouse.
[Inside was] a 19-count felony indictment that charges Tasha Purnell — OIiver’s former name — with multiple rape and other sex crimes from 2010 through 2014 against a girl who was a minor.
Like pick up the phone and call the school?
But if you’d done that, you’d have missed your chance to hire a rapist of children as a School District therapist for K-5 students.
Swasticar tanking in Germany.
Quebec is considering expanding Bill 21, which already keeps public sector employees from wearing religious clothing/objects while on the job. Not only teachers, for instance, but also students, would, in this proposed expansion, not be permitted to wear hijabs.
Of course the Muslim community spokesman in my headline reveals the problem: Secular legislation is wildly popular in secular Quebec. Banning religious garb is indeed a surefire way to bolster your poll numbers. So the question at issue is whose “fundamental rights”? UD, for instance, considers it a fundamental right of secular countries, states, and provinces to protect their secularity in certain restricted realms (government schools being one of them). Further, she fully admits that her support for restricted secular laws has to do not only with respect for the strongly expressed will of people in some localities that the secular nature of their sense of themselves as a culture be enshrined in law, but also with her belief that schoolgirls too young to have any say in the matter should not be draped head to toe. This obviously repressive form of fundamentalist religious expression offends her liberal sensibilities; it degrades the promise of equality at the heart of democratic regimes. I don’t think parents have a fundamental right to wrap their eight year old daughters in head and body sheeting before they can go outside.

Altogether odd and beautiful weather this spring, back and forth from sunny and warm and calm to gray and cool and windy. I’ve tossed Magical Flames and Firestart onto the grate, and on top I’ve piled old woody grapevines that sheared off a tree in one of the windstorms. Mr UD got the black statues when he worked for the UN in East Timor. The tan camels we brought back from India, and to the right is a Corbu-themed quilt that students of Jerzy Soltan made for him.
UD reflects, looking at this fire and also at people/dogs walking on Rokeby Avenue, that though she’s done quite a lot of traveling (as you know if you read this blog), she likes best to be at her peaceful home, whose last owner was Munro Leaf. Ferdinand the Bull’s spirit remains here, decades after the death of the man who conjured him.
Yeah, that’s why a house full of loaded guns was just the ticket.
Lee Grodzins, MIT professor, lived one of the great lives. Read the whole thing.
He got his favorite student evaluation … for a course, billed as offering a “superficial overview” of nuclear physics. The comment read: “This physics course was not superficial enough for me.”
… Early on, he joined several Manhattan Project alums at MIT in their concern about the consequences of nuclear bombs. In Vietnam-era 1969, Grodzins co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists, which calls for scientific research to be directed away from military technologies and toward solving pressing environmental and social problems.
… In 1999, Grodzins founded the nonprofit Cornerstones in Science, a public library initiative to improve public engagement with science. Based originally at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, Cornerstones now partners with libraries in Maine, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California. Among their initiatives was one that has helped supply telescopes to libraries and astronomy clubs around the country.
… an important GOP fundraising event, with Steve Bannon giving the keynote salute.

A Manhattan art advisor explains that she tries to make clients feel comfortable and not taken advantage of in the intimidating, arcane, art market. Then she steals all their money.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BZK35yCTD
****************************
And a reminder of his tragic homeland:
‘[Under Trump,] they see an opportunity in their proximity to power. They’re not lonely figures, lonely prophets shouting at the margins, but they’re very close to the halls of power, and some are perhaps working within those halls of power right now, as we speak… Vermeule talks about using the bureaucracy, using the administrative state to nudge people in the right direction.’
******************************
Wink wink nudge nudge is your administrative state a goer? Does it… you know… go? Mwoohohohohoo, ay? Hohohohohoho, ay?
“They want science to be part of the human — [their] philosophy [is] they want to say that mankind is creating the world,” [an ultraorthodox spokesman] said. “We say everything is by God.”
… [He] objects to the [NY] Education Department’s idea that it would be good, as he put it, to “open your kids to the world and teach them about everything.”
********************
Apparently the schools rejecting New York State education requirements are forming a new group: UUSF (United Ultraorthodox Schools Fund) with the motto A MIND IS A BEAUTIFUL THING TO WASTE.
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
- 2026 (548)
- 2025 (936)
- 2024 (822)
- 2023 (733)
- 2022 (852)
- 2021 (751)
- 2020 (789)
- 2019 (753)
- 2018 (803)
- 2017 (749)
- 2016 (863)
- 2015 (861)
- 2014 (1052)
- 2013 (1019)
- 2012 (1187)
- 2011 (1399)
- 2010 (1372)
- 2009 (1450)
- 2007 (1)
Categories
- 54: The new elderly (1)
- ADA DOOM (196)
- amy bishop (32)
- AYE (6)
- bad writing (25)
- Balinesia (1)
- be still my heart (208)
- beware the b-school boys (160)
- beach blogging (7)
- blog (98)
- blogoscopy (32)
- blood blogging (12)
- bright red shorts (1)
- chesapeake (4)
- chief inspiration officer (53)
- class (21)
- CLICK-THROUGH U. (6)
- CLICK-THRU U. (127)
- code brown (17)
- conflict of interest (314)
- contest! (8)
- da guy's got balls (14)
- defenses of liberal education (33)
- delillo (85)
- democracy (948)
- demon rum (72)
- diploma mill (119)
- dispatches from the classroom (16)
- end the erasure of women (137)
- evil dr phil (1)
- EVITA (6)
- extracts (206)
- faculty project (34)
- failure to yield pun (3)
- father/son gunnies (11)
- FGM (81)
- floridly overwritten (4)
- foreign universities (159)
- forms of religious experience (823)
- free speech (76)
- fresh blood (68)
- Genius of the Carpathians (234)
- gevalt (8)
- ghost writing (55)
- goathean (2)
- goddess (2)
- Gomer (26)
- good writing (125)
- great writing (152)
- guns (1,215)
- harvard: bar fly (5)
- harvard: foreign and domestic policy (112)
- harvard: gearing up for the winter (7)
- harvard: handouts (10)
- headline of the day (411)
- henry purcell (13)
- heroes (159)
- heroines (116)
- high as a kite (45)
- hoax (282)
- how to make ud happy (22)
- How We Learn (42)
- hymnal (1)
- intellectuals (68)
- it's art (131)
- it's good to be the king (10)
- james joyce (75)
- jesus thinks you're a jerk (5)
- just plain gross (477)
- kind of a little weird (628)
- limericks (178)
- lion's willy (3)
- little hitler (4)
- Little Ick (13)
- march of science (257)
- merchandise (201)
- merkin muffley (2)
- merkins (12)
- Ministry of War (14)
- misconceived literary adaptations (1)
- morning mantra (1)
- newspaper poem (18)
- notes from a broad (1)
- nothing gold can stay (1)
- oedipus madoff (9)
- Of Mice and Men (1)
- Online Makeover (14)
- pill mill u. (7)
- plagiarism (335)
- poem (447)
- PowerPoint Confidential (15)
- powerpoint pissoff (50)
- professors (678)
- program support coordinator (2)
- protect yourself from bad poetry (2)
- satanic two-party system (1)
- Scathing Online Schoolmarm (311)
- screwed (134)
- screwed up (8)
- sentences that make UD laugh (28)
- smackdown (11)
- snapshots from a country (3)
- snapshots from assateague (10)
- snapshots from australia (1)
- snapshots from bath (1)
- snapshots from cambridge (11)
- snapshots from cherry springs (3)
- snapshots from corning (4)
- snapshots from dublin (21)
- snapshots from galway (9)
- snapshots from hawaii (1)
- snapshots from home (1,437)
- snapshots from houston (2)
- snapshots from hungary (1)
- snapshots from hyde park (2)
- snapshots from iceland (1)
- snapshots from india (11)
- snapshots from ireland (16)
- snapshots from kent island (1)
- snapshots from key west (66)
- snapshots from kurdistan (1)
- snapshots from la (1)
- snapshots from lisbon (1)
- snapshots from london (7)
- snapshots from malaga (1)
- snapshots from marbella (1)
- snapshots from mexico city (3)
- snapshots from munich (1)
- snapshots from naples (5)
- snapshots from new york (14)
- snapshots from Paris (5)
- snapshots from phoenix (2)
- snapshots from poland (3)
- snapshots from prague (2)
- snapshots from rehoboth (187)
- snapshots from sanibel (14)
- snapshots from scotland (3)
- snapshots from sedona (16)
- snapshots from shenandoah (17)
- snapshots from summit (30)
- snapshots from thailand (1)
- snapshots from the alps (1)
- snapshots from the azores (1)
- snapshots from the caliphate (1)
- snapshots from the Chesapeake (7)
- snapshots from the dolomites (1)
- snapshots from utah (7)
- snapshots from venice (12)
- snapshots from vermont (2)
- snapshots from Virginia (5)
- snapshots from warsaw (17)
- snapshots from west virginia (2)
- snapshots from zakopane (2)
- soltan inc. (60)
- somewhat baffled online schoolmarm (2)
- sounds and looks very samuel beckett (22)
- sport (2,786)
- Sport (158)
- STUDENTS (451)
- suicide (56)
- swaddled masses yearning to breathe free (8)
- tax syphon u. (2)
- tea (31)
- TEACH NAKED (2)
- TEACHING BEAUTY (2)
- technolust (218)
- THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL ME (3)
- the melnyk chronicles (1)
- the most irresponsible university in america (5)
- the piece that passeth all understanding (4)
- the rest is silence (37)
- the shame of a nation (12)
- the university (430)
- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (2)
- tiny (2)
- TRUMP DEATH WATCH (2)
- trust me – i'm a doctor (7)
- trustees trashing the place (225)
- ud officially embarrassed to be a woman (7)
- ud's hippie years (12)
- UD/DC (17)
- unhoused (1)
- VERY LIKE A CME. (4)
- We'll get through this. (46)
- what do english professors dream? (1)
- where the simulacrum ends (33)
- you're wrong (1)
- Your Morning Giggle (50)
