UD‘s extremely proud to appear in the following first paragraph in an Anthony Grafton essay in The New Republic:
Morning, nowadays, means coffee and the Times, as it did for my parents. But it also means something they never experienced: a trip across the Web. Slipping from link to link, occasionally falling in and spending a few minutes in one place, I pass from TNR to NYRB to Bookforum, from Atrios to Steve Benen, from Easily Distracted to University Diaries to Tenured Radical to TigerHawk, from Historiann and Arts & Letters Daily to Cliopatria and Athens & Jerusalem, from Andrew Sullivan to Megan McArdle to Ta-Nehisi Coates—and, for perspective, to the obituaries in the Telegraph.
Talk about being in good company.
Tony’s reviewing Mary Beard‘s latest book — UD and Mary are longtime mutual blog admirers.
UD thanks her friend Christina for noticing the TNR essay.
As we await Madoff’s sentencing today, we revisit unapologetically ill-run Yeshiva University.
[Many institutions connected to Madoff] not only need to more formally organize their investing and giving along more official corporate governance lines — Yeshiva University in particular has been cited for this type of needed reform. [T]hey may need to address their own unwitting complicity in the dissipation of the assets of Mr. Madoff’s victims.
Madoff, recall, was Yeshiva’s treasurer, Ezra Merkin an influential trustee. There’s been no public reckoning with this history on that campus, and conflict of interest remains the all-male board of trustees’ middle name.
Sure, Yeshiva lost money through Madoff. It also made plenty of money – for itself, and for its trustees. Yeshiva has said nothing by way of acknowledgement of the depth of its misdeeds.
**********************
Update: It’s also a good day to remember this letter, written last year to the president of Yeshiva from one of its law school graduates, Andrew Sole. Here are its closing paragraphs:
[H]arm has come to this distinguished University, both in financial loss and worse, in reputation. It is my view that the harm today is directly attributable to the failed performance of our trustees. As fiduciaries they lost sight of their primary mission, to safeguard the long-term interests of Yeshiva University. Whether their activities were merely negligent, or worse, that judgment is best left for others.
In my view it will take a generation to repair the damage inflicted upon Yeshiva. And that is very sad. But what would be even sadder, and which would also give grave concerns to Yeshiva’s many supporters, would be for the University to continue to allow the current Board of Trustees to serve as fiduciaries going forward.
The honorable course (and we have seen virtually no honorable behavior in American corporate boardrooms, nor in our public servants, in 2008) would be for the University’s President, and its legal counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, to demand the immediate resignation of the entire Board of Trustees. The University’s counsel, government regulators, and law enforcement will conduct their proper investigations, but the proud students, graduates, and supporters of Yeshiva University should not have to wait that long for credible and therapeutic action to be taken by this University.
Yeshiva has the opportunity to begin the healing process today by installing new fiduciaries that are untainted by scandal and embarrassment. I hope you will take this letter to heart and I wish the University the best during these incredibly trying times.
Yeshiva responded to Sole with a form letter brush-off.
And all of those men, those hands-in-each-others’-pockets men, those Madoff and Merkin men, remain on the Yeshiva University board of trustees.
Margaret Soltan is an emerita professor at George Washington University, in Washington, DC.
She has childish crushes on James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Henry Miller, and Don DeLillo.
Her 2008 book about beauty — cowritten with her friend and colleague, Jennifer Green-Lewis — is titled Teaching Beauty in DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill. The 2024 Routledge Companion to Literature and Art praises the book as a “notable work” on aesthetics. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan. Click on the title to go to its Amazon page, and to read some excerpts from it.
Although she’s enormously proud of Jenny’s and her book – which has featured on syllabi in America and abroad – Soltan is best-known for her essays in intellectual quarterlies – Salmagundi, Raritan, Feminist Studies, New Formations, American Literary History, PMLA, modernism/modernity, etc. – and for being one of Inside Higher Ed‘s first bloggers. She has always written about everything – architecture, poetry, fiction, drama, guns, fraud, pharma, religion, abortion, suicide, depression, sports, fraternities, philosophy, universities.
She spent a Fulbright year as a professor at the University of Warsaw, and a visiting year at the University of Toulouse.
Many people encounter Soltan for the first time via her timeless classic, “The Faculty Bench.”
You can see Soltan in all her glory if you download an interview she gave in 2007 – a chat on the PBS Lehrer News Hour about Doris Lessing.
Soltan made a second appearance on the Lehrer News Hour to talk about Dan Brown’s book, The Lost Symbol.
You can hear her talk to Radio Poland about her memories of the Polish artist Wojciech Fangor here (click the listen icon).
You can also hear her talk about Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It, to the BBC, if you go here. I’m toward the end of the December 14 program.
Soltan began, in March 2012, a series of lectures on poetry, available to the world via Udemy, a MOOC. Her course is part of Udemy’s Faculty Project. In October 2015, she had 11,877 students. The course is now closed.
Soltan’s husband is a just-retired professor of political science at the University of Maryland.
You can watch a seminar he recently gave on economic development at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development here.
With Peter Levine, he founded the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies. In summer 2015 he co-directed the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education in Chernivtsi, Ukraine. In 2016, he co-directed the same institute in Augsburg, Germany. In 2017, he co-directed both the Tufts and Ukraine sessions. His Ukraine co-director is Tanja Hoggan-Kloubert.
Tanja is a true and brave fighter for Ukraine. The link over her name is to her Facebook page, where you can follow her activism.
Last September, UD‘s husband taught at a new outpost of the Institute of Civic Studies, at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va.
UD‘s husband is named Karol Edward, after Charles Edouard Le Corbusier, in whose Paris atelier his father worked after the war. Here’s a link to a recently released book about UD‘s husband’s father. Architectural Digest Poland has an article about him here.
(Footnote 54, The Final Testament of Père Corbu: “See the letter [Jerzy] Soltan wrote [to LC] from Warsaw on 27 April 1950… ‘Hanka (my wife) is most probably pregnant – if it is a boy, he will certainly be named Charles-Edouard!'”)
Her daughter, Ania Soltan, lives in Washington, DC, where she works at Hakluyt. She spent the summer of 2013 at the Abbey Theatre, on an internship. Before that, she worked for Congressional Quarterly Press while finishing up at GW. She was a member of the GW Sirens, winners of the 2010 Battle of the A Cappella Bands at GW (Ania’s the blond in glasses just to the left of the soloist). She sang in a gospel choir with Bruce Springsteen at the Super Bowl. Her group also sang with him at the Obama inauguration concert.
On Sunday, December 6, 2009, she performed with the same group at the Kennedy Center Honors. They sang The Rising in honor of Bruce Springsteen, one of the honorees. Instead of singing it with Springsteen, who watched from the audience, they sang it with Sting. Here’s a You Tube, with the kid – long blond hair, glasses – showing up at 1:48. (UD thanks a reader for telling her that an earlier You Tube of the event was no longer working.)
In December 2011, La Kid sang with Jennifer Hudson at the annual Christmas in Washington event. Front row, blond hair, glasses.
In December 2013, she sang with Diana Ross at the same event.
In December 2014, she sang with Rufus Wainwright at the Kennedy Center Honors to honor Billy Joel. Catch La Kid at 2:50 on this YouTube. Also in December 2014, she sang with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and other notables at Christmas in Washington. She’s the blond standing just above The Rock starting at 6:17 in this YouTube.
Soltan’s sister, Frances, is a Morrissey fanatic. Her niece, Carolyn, is the indispensable webmistress of University Diaries.