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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, January 27, 2005

FLORIDA, VIRGINIA, NEW HAMPSHIRE, KUWAIT


Lots of news, UDites, even if you don't count the fact that UD's kid is slated to sing with her chorus at a benefit this March at the Kuwaiti Embassy, at which the guests of honor will be Colin Powell and ... ANGELINA JOLIE! (Apparently Jolie has forgiven UD for that little post [UD, 3/29/04] awhile back...)


In other news:


** The Florida Board of Governors has just decisively voted down the chiropractic school that politicians tried to impose upon Florida State University. UD is happy, but not surprised.

** There's a murky tale growing murkier by the minute out of the University of Virginia, involving allegations of sexual misconduct with students by a professor there. He was apparently summarily dismissed from various positions at the university, and of course his name is permanently besmirched, etc. But what has he done? To whom? According to his account, he has done nothing wrong, and he hasn't been told what he's been accused of. He was just told he'd done wrong and the following unpleasant things were about to happen to him...

** Another developing university story, a kind of younger brother to the Summers mess, involves a Dartmouth adminstrator having said (or rather written) something just as obviously true as the statement that men and women have innate differences -- and getting into just as much trouble as Summers is in. The Dartmouth story demonstrates that boys are just as touchy as girls. In the Summers case, the National Organization of Women has demanded his resignation; in the Dartmouth case, a bunch of jocks have demanded this guy's resignation.

His sin? He wrote a private letter a few years ago to a fellow college administrator in which he said the following:

"I am writing to commend you on the decision to eliminate football from your athletic offerings. I wish this were not true but sadly football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours."