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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)

Monday, July 30, 2007

UD Quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Ed ...


...this morning. She's part of a group of responses to an American Scholar essay about the erotic lives of professor guys. The UD quote:



'It's hard to feel you're a real man unless you can occasionally misbehave in gratifying ways, but the only departments where this can be done (aside, obviously, from athletics) are business, economics, engineering, and those hard sciences that attract a lot of funding. ... You want to feel you're a player in capitalist sport, but there's just no way to play in English departments. No one cares how badly you abuse the little gifts — the Guggenheim, the weeny grant for two weeks in a room near an Italian lake — that the humanities offer. If, as [Philip] Rieff suggests, the humanities professor is not supplementing his goodie bag with a love of teaching, he's on his way down.'


But that's only part of what I said. Remember how clever my full statement was? No?




The Chronicle's list includes a curious comment from Ethan Leib, of PrawfsBlawg and the University of California Hastings College of Law:


'Although legal academics have it much better than college professors in so many ways ... there is little love on campus. That's, I think, as it should be among adults — but those of us with Ph.D.'s who decide to teach in vocational schools are often giving up what Deresiewicz calls "erotic intensity." In law school, instrumental rationality finds a way to smother eros in the classroom.'



Giving up? They're not giving up. People who choose to spend their best years inside law schools are embracing asexuality.