
The COO of this hoitsy toitsy outfit (Meier/Piano architecture!) has been stealing hundreds of thousands from it for years. Nobody suspected cuz you know we’re fine, finely credentialed, people here. And yet if the museum had done a bit of due diligence they’d have found a college plagiarist (“Brady Lum, … an Honor Committee chairman … in late 1988, was accused of plagiarism.” Honor Committee!), and a guy (I think it’s the same guy) who, in a 2011 UVa speech, said
I have a simple message for you today – say “yes” to more in life. That’s really all you need to know.
Say yes to the museum’s endowment! Even if you’re making almost $400,000 a year (I know – a humiliating pittance in Lum’s world), get your fingers in that pie! Yes! I’ll take it!
Emerald Fennell’s wondrously sicko “Wuthering Heights” is a real-time aesthetic parallel to the ever-elaborating Epstein/Mountbatten epic. She couldn’t have timed her exploration of our darkest urges more brilliantly: Her film pulses with the power of perversity, but does its thing playfully, as art will.
In the real world we cluck and cluck about famous greedy depraved self-destroyers. We pretend astonishment at each new twisted twist.
As in:
The Nurse Racheds among us gasp to find ICE Barbie melting in the arms of her sub! Before this, she was a perfectly normal person who shot puppies (Heathcliff hanged them).
Newly released audio from early 2013, part of a Feb 2026 release, features Epstein and former Israeli PM Ehud Barak discussing “gigantic” sums of money allegedly paid to [Tony] Blair for consultancy work, including a reported $11m/year from Kazakhstan.
Completely trashy is good.
Prince Harry … has always been “frustrated” by comparisons to his uncle. “It was never fair to lump them together,” an insider [said]. “Harry served his country, did the job well and never engaged in misconduct — yet lost security and housing, while Andrew was protected for years.”
Let Cecil Beaton’s terse eulogy for Evelyn Waugh be also the eulogy (he hasn’t died yet) for Andrew M-W.
UD loves Beaton’s clever statement, and was sorry to see, years after using variants of it in many contexts, that she’d been misquoting it. He actually wrote So Evelyn Waugh is in his coffin. Died of snobbery.
Some worries up in Quebec about how Biker Boy blessings might have to get municipal approval if tighter secularism laws get passed.
Sorry, but UD’s loving the verbal fallout. Keep it coming!
Wishing does not make it so.
Nice example of ambiguity.
And there goes the lapdog owners vote.
*********
”[T]he court sends the blunt message that Trump should not expect SCOTUS to rubber-stamp all of his expansions of executive power, no matter how much political pressure he puts on the justices.”
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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