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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, April 15, 2004

PROPER ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

UD is always happy, in her very gracious way, to acknowledge things that universities are doing right. Some universities. In some departments. Sometimes.

Lunch yesterday with a student at UD's university who's going to graduate school in English next year reminds UD to mention, for instance, the welcome change in some English departments toward admitting very few applicants and funding them all. Judging by her student's current experience, UD concludes that the best schools aggressively recruit, generously subsidize, and actually place in tenure track jobs, most of the people they admit.

Why, in my day (insert croaky voice here), universities would admit eighty students, fund a lucky, loathed few, and then begin systemically shedding seventy. This procedure, while bracing in a neo-darwinian way, generated resentment, and didn't necessarily reward the best and brightest. Nurturing from birth a few highly selected and much-loved cubs seems more sensible and more humane.