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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)

Monday, May 14, 2007

Usually, the Designation...

..."Number One Party School" refers to students.

At the University of Texas, it's the grownups in the loan office:



[The] financial aid office ... was oblivious to conflicts of interest but ... kept meticulous track of “lender treats” like ice cream, happy hours and birthday cakes that apparently were considered in deciding whether to put loan companies on lists recommended to students.

... [Investigators] found documents showing how lenders sought access to students through gifts to university officials. Just last February, Tom Ramaeker of Access Group, another lender, sent an e-mail message to a financial aid officer to find out whether his company “made the cut” for the 2007-08 preferred lender list. He went on to offer to take [the now-fired director of financial aid] and a subordinate to play golf.

... [Investigators also] found that [the university's financial aid director] sent an e-mail message to a company representative telling him how he wore a loan company shirt while giving an interview with Fox News. “I did a billboard for you,” [he] wrote. The loan company official responded by asking about football tickets to a coming university game. He added that he was willing to pay for [the administrator's] football tickets to a game and that [he] could stay at his house.



---new york times---