Kamel Daoud speaks.

[Arab women] are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say … [T]oday, with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe... People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.

***********************

An essential companion piece.

Finally, someone has the guts to call out Anne Frank’s white privilege.

CONTENT WARNING: Everything.

‘[The burqa] is rooted in the belief that women are impure and inferior. This goes against the principle of equality, and against Article 14 of the Spanish constitution. [The hijab and body veiling are] forced on minors by their families, which means that they cannot choose for themselves.’

A Spanish human rights activist argues for restrictions on various forms of Islamic dress in her country.

Blue ain’t my garden color, but…

… you can’t argue with these containers.

On my morning walk through Garrett Park.

Gender segregation in England??? Color me shocked.

They’re pretty much the last holdout in Europe on allowing the burqa, and like idiots they pride themselves on their tolerance even of cultural vileness.

Years ago, this blog covered the efforts of Muslim students to impose strict gender segregation in British universities, with the enthusiastic backing of the official body in charge of such matters. It took a lot of screaming and crying for this scandal to end.

And after all, having tolerated a branch of Islam rigidly determined to erase women, the Brits constantly have to tamp down further discrimination.

Things like a recent foot race which barred women from participating, for instance, continue to make the Brits look idiotic. The race went off without a hitch and without any women, and only after the thing happened did it occur to someone or other that there weren’t any women in it. So now oh yeah NOW we’re gonna appoint a committee to review that and for sure we shall do er something.

‘Parents often justify the procedure by believing they are acting in their children’s best interests—protecting their morals, ensuring virginity, or conforming to community standards.’

An article about the emergent scandal of medicalized FGM is much too coy: The point of the procedure is to assure that, their whole lives long, the women of Africa and Asia (230 million of them are currently walking around without sex organs) are guaranteed never to have even a teeny weeny blip of sexual pleasure. Total erotic numbness is the prescription, which your local doctor will happily fill for you. You can talk morals, virginity, the community, all you like. It ain’t none of that, really. It’s the amputation of the clitoris, and with it the death of erotic sensation forever. Some docs will sew your vagina shut too, just for good measure.

Until you understand that for hundreds of millions of human beings around the globe the thought of their daughters having the capacity to experience sexual pleasure is such an atrocity that they’d rather rip out their genitalia than run that risk, you’ll never get anywhere with this vile behavior. It really is there that you have to work: Just as public disgust with smoking decreased its prevalence, so disgust with violent hatred of female sexuality must be publicly expressed.

I say racket.

Some say that education consultants provide valuable skills and services to ensure schools can find the right leaders and focus on the right goals. Others say the business is a racket that wields too much influence and lines too many pockets.

[Des Moines Public Schools] has spent six figures of taxpayer money on that business. Now, it will spend boatloads more on attorneys to comb through the damage and shield the district from as much blame as possible for the [Ian] Roberts fallout.

And that’s to say nothing of the expenditure required to find a new superintendent.

The ed consulting racket is one of many rackets that made the world safe for Donald Trump. Here’s hoping the current notoriety of its most high-profile racketeer will help shut it all down.

The Gammy Defense

“They claim that I, this grandma, was the mastermind behind this murder,” [Donna Adelson] said.

Two of UD’s Garrett Park neighbors…

… chat in front of a labyrinth.

‘Both burqa and niqab are expressions of … women’s oppression and honor-based oppression, and that is something we Social Democrats distance ourselves from.’

Left and right in Sweden look ready to go: A burqa/niqab ban is definitely on its way.

*********************

Ugh. “Almost 70,000 women are female genital mutilated in this country.”

There are so many deep south gun massacres, news outlets are going to have to review their policies.

If they’re killing/injuring twenty people every weekend in bars and at big public events, why go there? It isn’t news if it’s just routine.

I mean, local coverage, sure; but why should the NYT waste its time on something as common as the common cold? UD doesn’t think you should reward states with no gun laws by paying attention to them. Their political class has created a wasteland, which is certainly a mark of shame for our country. But we’ve established these facts. The rest is just one vile stupid slaughter after another.

Now UD is a different matter. She’s not pretending to “report” on this shit. She pays attention because the rest of us need constantly to abuse ridicule and revile our sickest, most suicidal, most homicidal, gunny states. Otherwise, nothing changes.

*********************

Man, I was wondering when we’d hear from Louisiana! Good ol’ murdering LSU.

Mississippi setting records left and right!

The state has “the single worst rate of gun deaths in the country,” and when you look at Leland High School’s homecoming gathering on Friday you can see how it got there. Most mass shootings manage to kill five or six; but the little folk of Leland and environs (the shooters probably range in age from 14-18) have already killed eight and injured at least twenty. They are definitely setting the mass shooting standard for the nation, and because they’re so young and because Mississippi basically has no gun laws they have decades of slaughter ahead of them.

*************************

 “No triggers, no warnings that something like this would take place,” says a local official, and what a hoot. No triggers or warnings except for the fact that everyone over 12 in your state shoots off guns and you’re fucking notorious for the bloodshed all over Mississippi. Other than that, nothing to indicate a problem.

*******************

Wow! There’s more!

Two separate shootings were reported Saturday, Oct 11, related to Mississippi campuses, one at Jackson State University and another at Alcorn State University.

The two shootings follow three separate Friday night shooting incidents related to high school football events in the state.

***********************

 ‘Mississippi’s gun death rate in 2024 was 116% higher than the national average.

This weekend, they’ve been showing you how they do it. And they still have Sunday!

‘While I don’t support hijabs on children, neither do I believe that targeting those who wear them supports state secularism.’

A very confused Canadian person tells us that she – quite rightly – opposes the grotesquerie of swaddling very little girls in the hijab. But this is only a kind of whispered aside; she is actually indignant throughout the piece that Quebec’s secular government has issued a complaint about an image, in a children’s book, of a very little girl swaddled in a hijab. She sees this complaint as bullying.

No, babe. Bullying is parents forcing body draping on a helpless child.

******************

She says there’s no knowing how many in Quebec approve of this form of secularism. Oh but there is: Oodles of opinion polls show strong support for banning hijabs in the public realm. That’s what the current national controversy over Bill 21 is about.

Reasonable people can debate whether adults in public sector jobs should drape their heads and bodies; only religious bullies would consider the blanketing of female babies and toddlers defensible.

I mean, even the opinion writer feels the need to disclose that she in fact opposes the thing she’s defending. I wonder why she opposes it. Her argument would have made more sense if she’d spilled a bit of ink on the matter.

The Grift that Keeps on Giving

‘Their collaboration has continued with [Ian] Roberts behind bars. [Roberts’ collaborator] said on Sep. 29 she was told by Roberts’ wife to move forward with publishing a book called “Unshakeable,” a compilation of Roberts’ inspirational messages to Des Moines schools.

Iowa’s finest, Ian Roberts, committed more than the so far – what? – five thousand? crimes he committed as Des Moines public schools superintendent. He also awarded Des Moines school district contracts to his own side business, which specialized in soaking DEI budgets.

The district did catch one of his early attempts to pocket money in this way; but apparently they failed to catch later, successful, ones.

How stupid is Iowa? MUCH stupider than I ever imagined.

*******************

There’s a DEI sickness at the heart of Iowa’s public schools. It’s why they hired and retained a consummate con man.

Franchement, they got what they deserved. New leadership needed. Desperately.

Nice writing, from a review of a film about academia.

From start to finish, “After the Hunt” sets its audience adrift on a sea of unmoored signifiers, flailing to keep up with all the arm-wavey gestures at “academia” and “bourgeois morality” and “ethics,” providing nothing beneath to hold it all together and indicate it knows what any of it means.

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte