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
June 12th, 2009 at 1:42AM
Psychologically speaking, the compromise of academic physicians by Pharma is not hard to understand. It’s like any other form of seduction — you have to want it to happen. If you need a rationalization, what better than "A passionate affair with your drug which makes you desperate to protect it and show it in its best light — a desire its manufacturer abets."
June 12th, 2009 at 7:31AM
Hmm…
It should be understood that the actual discoverer or creator of a drug is most often not a physician. The personal understanding of the drug discovery process by physicians is usually laughable. More typically, some chemist in industry or a university is responsible.
Now I know two examples – academics – of people who have discovered so called blockbuster drugs. Both of these guys have become enormously wealthy and made huge financial contributions to their institutions. But they are remarkably unaffected by all this and continue working away doing research and teaching – because they actually enjoy it.
June 12th, 2009 at 9:10AM
I think the "supremely weird shit" part is unfair. Reason #1 is just an awkward expression of a problem most academics face — having their objectivity compromised by their engagement with the subject of their research. (I can only imagine the metaphors used by those publishing long-gestating biographies.) Reason #2 (greed) is somewhat more distinctive and likely more powerful in this context. But those who depend on grants are hardly immune, I would guess.
June 12th, 2009 at 9:38AM
I think it’s fair. One is welcome to have a complex relationship with the subject of one’s research; one is welcome to be engaged in it in all sorts of weirdly intense ways. The reason COI is such a problem is that there’s a clear difference between complex research relationships and mercenary, mendacious research relationships. Buse’s thing is weird shit because he’s offering as a kind of defense of corrupt and destructive behavior his (admirable) intensity about his work. That’s not only weird. It’s totally unpersuasive.
In fact there’s nothing complex or even interestingly psychological about trading your name or institutional affiliation or reputation for money (Reason #2), and neither is there much of interest on that level about lobbying in underhanded ways — colluding in ghostwriting, for instance — for your drug or your medical device (#1). You believe in it, you want it to get attention and to do well, so when people come along offering to help you along those lines, you say yes, even though their motives may be unscrupulous and may draw you into unethical behaviors.
Both Reason #1 and Reason #2 are crucially about compromising the integrity of your research in various ways. Until biography-gestators begin lying about their subjects for money, or putting their name on a biography they haven’t written, they don’t belong in this discussion.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:03AM
Thanks for the reply. I think you are using #2 to drive all your concerns about #1. You suggest that Buse is being extremely weird and unpersuasive with regard to #1, but that seems to punish him for being candid, transparent, and in my view reasonably accurate — about an attachment problem that colors all kind of work not driven to such a degree by greed (#2). As to whether he is defending his behavior by alluding to his mothering instincts, I again don’t think that’s fair: I haven’t seen his deposition, but the link you provide suggests he said "I’m not saying that the pharmaceutical industry captures me * * * But to the extent that the relationship has something above and beyond medicine, science, you know, it could cloud one’s judgment." That sounds more explanatory than justificatory to me.
If we focus, as I think is appropriate, on greed as the distinguishing feature of this conduct — which I think is consistent with the vast majority of your criticisms on this topic — I do think it is appropriate to acknowledge that there are a variety of ways in which findings are encouraged by financial incentives that are less overt than the drug company examples. I agree that most misconduct that results from these incentives is less obvious than what we are seeing here. But I’d wager we can call to mind examples in which it’s quite obvious that promotion, leadership within learned societies, and grants establish very strong incentives for skewing scholarship. . . . even if it’s sometimes harder to evaluate any resulting falsity, or associate it with real-world consequences for consumers.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:46AM
Ani: I think I take your point, and it’s an important one. There’s a continuum here, and at all levels and types of scholarship we can see plenty of examples of people responding to incentives — financial, reputational, whatever — by skewing their research in various ways.
I mean, we could move from the crudest and most obvious forms of compromising your work — Doris Kearns Goodwin and Charles Ogletree plagiarize in order to get lots of books out quickly and keep their names in the public eye — that’s the incentive of ambition and all its attendant goodies — or the presidents of Jacksonville State and Southern Illinois Carbondale plagiarize their dissertations because they have to have a PhD. to get a certain job — we could move from that to, as you suggest, much more complex forms of self-compromise… The sort of forms you see Buse impressively trying to get at.
These more complex forms seem to have to do with, as you say, attachment problems – the ways in which we become caught up in our own sense of what’s true and important, and then become over-eager to have the world accept as true and important what we think true and important. To have the world pay attention…
I guess the only point to make, in this particular regard, is the obvious one — There are indeed real-world consequences for vulnerable populations when people like Buse – for reasons that might even be admirable – allow themselves to be co-opted by commercial interests.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:07PM
Thanks for the gracious reply. As I hope is clear, I don’t mean to excuse the behavior you criticize. I just sometimes worry that the features distinguishing medical school academics from everyone else are (1) tangible, discrete, and traceable financial gain, and (2) real-world consequences for error. Macroeconomists probably bear a close resemblance.