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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)

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

What UD’s Missing
By Not Watching TV


New York Times, Arts Section:


'The trouble with the WB series "The Bedford Diaries" isn't the sex, it's the curriculum.

The courses at Bedford, a fictional college campus in New York City, include an elective seminar titled "Sexual Behavior and the Human Condition" (video diaries, not Havelock Ellis) and a survey course, "Urban Public Health" (Valtrex, not Venetian canals). The only hint of a Western canon in the premiere is a course that mentions 17th-century Spanish portraiture. (At least it's the Prado, not Prada.)

But basically, "The Bedford Diaries" is Harold Bloom's nightmare...

…All of [the main characters] enroll in the hottest course on campus, the seminar on sexuality taught by Prof. Jake Macklin (Matthew Modine), who calls his classroom a forum for "revelation and personal exploration." In each episode, at least one of the students makes an intimate video confession as part of the class work. Professor Macklin also makes a video diary about his own sex life…'