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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)

Saturday, October 09, 2004

A LULL IN THE PROCEEDINGS



The Nome Nugget has now said that the “embarrassment” of diploma mill degree holders in the University of Alaska system -- people like incoming faculty senate president Michael Hannigan -- “needs immediate action.” (UD thanks a reader for forwarding this editorial to her.) Yet things in the Hannigan matter [for background, see UD post dated 9/21/04] seem to have settled in for a wait. Having decisively lost a faculty vote of confidence and brought derision to his institution, Hannigan is sitting on his hands rather than handing over his resignation as senate president.

Perhaps he knows something UD doesn’t know. Perhaps large numbers of other faculty in the University of Alaska system are strutting about doctorally when all they really have are fake degrees, and perhaps Hannigan is threatening to reveal a horrific scandal which will draw national attention to Alaska…

But UD doubts it. She continues to believe that the combination of vanity, amorality, cynicism, sloth, and idiocy that would prompt a person to push the YES! I’M READY TO PURCHASE MY PHD NOW! button on their keyboard is a rare one, especially among academics. (Most of the diploma mill business comes from people in the government - particularly the military - or corporations.) UD doesn’t doubt that there are many unimpressive degrees among the faculty in Alaska, as there will be among faculty in any state. But a shitty accredited degree is significantly different from a simulacral non-accredited sheet of embossed paper.

The way out of the Hannigan havoc is for him to apologize, withdraw from the presidency, stop calling himself a doctor, and go back to the classroom.