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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, October 04, 2007

Talk About
Varieties of
Beardedness!


One of UD's early,
now-classic, posts categorized
senior male professors in terms
of beard type.


















This is Professor
Robert L. Birmingham
of the University of
Connecticut Law School,
and UD is speechless.






No, no, not really. She's never speechless. Birmingham's been asked to take leave right in the middle of the semester because something he did -- these stories are always a bit vague, which is why UD wasn't going to blog about this one, but she couldn't resist the photo -- offended his students so much that the university decided to ditch him for the moment. He showed a film that included some naked women in it... He said something about the slave trade that might or might not have been outrageous... Go here for the newspaper account, and for the fifty or so comments after it, some of them by students in the class (most of whom support Birmingham and are pissed off on free speech and pragmatic grounds... the pragmatic bit being that they're out of a course...).


Birmingham seems to have written himself quite the Wikipedia page. It begins with the following comment from Wikipedia:


This article reads like a news release, or is otherwise written in an overly promotional tone. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view to be less promotional.



... and... what are we to make of the sunglasses? The big big sunglasses?

On their way to the Grosvenor Metro station this morning, Mr. and Ms. UD pondered this. Or rather Mr. UD shrugged (It was very early. He wasn't really interested.) and Ms. UD came up with the following theory: "Of course, it's possible he has a health condition of some kind. But say he doesn't. ... Maybe the university has a requirement that you provide a photo for your webpage. Maybe this guy is a privacy fanatic. Maybe this is his protest. He gives them the photo, sure, but he puts big anonymous-making shades on... Plus... look at that shirt! It's buttoned to within an inch of its life! It's all about withholding his identity from ... whatever..." (Here UD ran out of steam.)
Posted at: 10/04/2007 06:20:00 AM