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"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, June 17, 2004

LES C*NTES d'HOFFMAN


[Update. See post directly below for background.]


"However, CU Regent Susan Kirk said media outlets are making a bigger issue of the word and its context than is necessary.

'We are making an issue about a scholar being scholarly in a deposition, which is what we would want," said Kirk. 'Betsy Hoffman would never disparage women. I am an avowed feminist and I am embarrassed of all of them (feminists).'

Kirk said she has also heard the term being used with a positive connotation, such as in New Zealand and Australia, where it is used as a term of friendship for men or women."



UD hasn't yet excitedly googled New Zealand/Naughty Bits to find out whether this is true, but she will. [Update: Search time, one minute: "Likewise, in Australia, ‘cunt’ isn’t as harsh a word as it is the U.S. When Chopper calls someone a 'silly cunt,' it’s an Australian term of endearment."]

Meanwhile, the Tale of Hoffman is spinning wildly out of control, with media outlets everywhere jumping on the Bad President bandwagon [there's another Bad President story brewing - the president of the University of Hawaii has just been fired - but so far the reasons are too mysterious for a blog entry]. "Oooh - look what she said! Did you hear what she said??" President Hoffman herself broke down in tears the other day at a damage control news conference.

Anyway, Susan Kirk nails it. Hoffman's big sin was "being scholarly." UD has spent a good bit of time describing today's business model university; she has also tried to remind you what a scholarly professor at a scholarly university might look and sound like. How an actual scholar rose to a management position at a major American university is beyond UD - and in any case, it sounds as though President Hoffman is about to be shot down precisely for having inadvertently revealed herself to be a thinking person - but this is another opportunity for us to track the ways in which anti-intellectual regents like ol' Jim down there in the previous post, cynical lawyers, puritan feminists, mercenary litigants, and a lascivious press cooperate to destroy free thought.