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 19th, 2009 at 7:25AM
Yes, I know this type all too well.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:24PM
Some people confuse brilliance with assholery.
August 31st, 2009 at 7:54PM
IN MEMORY OF HODGES
It gave me great sadness to learn that Donald Clark Hodges passed away last month and it angers me to see his reputation sullied by bloggers who never met him and a journalist whose dispassionate article fails to do him justice. I was fortunate enough to study under Dr. Hodges in the years 2001-2004. Please allow me a few words to give you a better understanding of this great man.
To begin, I am a conservative, a true conservative, which means I think Bush, McCain, and much of the Republican Party are neocon liberals who have sold out the American people. Surely I am not the typical leftwing brainwashed student these bloggers are talking about in their disparaging remarks about my former professor. Hodges and I may have ultimately disagreed on more than we agreed, but he taught me far more than any professor I have ever studied under and he challenged me to see the world differently.
Hodges was a cosmopolitan man who traveled the world, lived a rich and adventurous life, and met many strange and interesting people. How many professors do you know chose to work in a factory just so they could experience what workers’ conditions are really like? How many American professors do you know are fluent enough in another language and culture to teach at a foreign university? How many professors do you know are adventurous enough to explore distant lands and track down the leaders of revolutionary organizations so that they could learn firsthand the “how” and “why” these insurgents are waging war against their enemies? When Latin America was the hotspot of its day, Hodges spent a great deal of time in places like Uruguay where he met people like Abraham Guillen. The friendship and mutual respect he built with Guillen actually resulted in Hodges translating the former’s premier revolutionary strategy book, “The Philosophy of the Urban Guerilla.” During these travels, the Uruguay authorities caught Hodges with subversive Tupamaro literature and brought him in for questioning. How many professors do you know could tell you a story like this with a glint in his eyes and laugh about being interrogated under an intense light beam like some old spy movie? Stories like these were plentiful from an adventurous man who did much more than lecture to his class about things he read from some book. Hodges animated his lectures with the many colors of his vast life experience.
Hodges was a prolific writer with countless books and articles to his name. He was one of the most erudite scholars of Latin American revolutionary theory of his time and his understanding of class politics in the United States was matched by very few. Following in the footsteps of James Burnham, Hodges believed that the simple divisions of capital and labor can no longer explain what is going on in America. He wrote multiple books about America’s new economic order and its new class, a managerial and professional class, which has taken control of the lion’s share of the surplus generated in Western societies.
Hodges was not an idle scholar who wasted his free time watching television or surfing the web. He was a serious reader who could spend the entire day marking up his books with notes in the margin, though he confessed to me that his wife eventually forbade him of this graffiti practice. When the man studied something, he did so thoroughly. Brilliantly. True scholarship to Hodges meant reading every book available on a subject and then taking it one step further by reading every biography available on the authors he read so that he could know the meaning of their words through their own eyes. Hodges would also track down original sources to see for himself if they were being cited correctly or taken out of their proper context. The knowledge he accumulated from this methodical and painstaking research was truly amazing as was his ability to easily recall this information for his audience. When Hodges quoted someone in class, he would always give you author, title, and year of publication. The man was a walking bibliography.
Hodges was not your typical professor who used PowerPoint or chalkboards. He talked to the class, lesson after lesson, tangent after tangent, quote after quote, life experience after life experience, the next always more interesting than the last until he had come full circle and given you a comprehensive, and often radical, understanding of the course material. I still have and refer to the many notes I took in his classes. My pen was always scribbling, trying to keep up with his radiant mind as he led us on a wondrous intellectual journey into the realms of politics, economics, history, and philosophy.
From what I knew of his personal life, Hodges was something of a solitary man. He rarely, if ever, attended social events with his contemporaries and I suspect this was because he wanted to avoid the groupthink leftism that plagues most academic circles. Certainly he was a leftist himself in the most conventional understanding of the word, but Hodges was not the Marxist fundamentalist that others have made him out to be. In fact, I remember him chuckling to us that a Marxist is only what he “wanted” people to believe of him. To get where you need to go, Hodges often told us, sometimes you have to signal left before turning right, and sometimes you have to signal right before turning left.
Hodges was not the type of man to rely on generic categorizations, but he styled himself an anarcho-syndicalist along the lines of Mikhail Bakunin and Abraham Guillen. He was not an advocate of big government and he was against the Marxist understanding of the State as being the solution, not part of the problem. Left-wing or right-wing politics did no much matter to Hodges because they were, in his opinion, wings of the same bird of prey. He did share Marx’s strong belief in dialectical materialism and would often tell us that if you wanted to understand politics, then never forget to follow the golden rule of politics—follow the gold! Hodges was also an outspoken advocate of liberty and freedom who, at the same time, recognized these principles were worthless without power. “There are no rights,” he once told us, “only powers. Without power, rights would cease to exist.” Hodges was something of a Machiavellian in his interpretation of politics as the pursuit of power. “Politics” he taught us, “is about power, who has it and how do you get it?” This realist understanding of power should not blacken the reputation of a man who was empathetic to the world around him. Hodges may not have been an idealist driven by utopian fantasies, but he was a simple man who believed in defending those who could not defend themselves.
Whatever your opinion of Hodges or his beliefs, none can deny that he was a brilliant man, a bizarre genius if you would, who captured the imagination of students who loved him. He taught us to think for ourselves and to always look at things from the perspective of consequentiality. One of my favorite lessons of Hodges was a conclusion he shared with Marx about philosophy and human purpose. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx wrote, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Hodges thought Marx was right, consequentiality is all that matters. The people and ideas you should study are those which have impacted the world and done something to change it for good or for worse. Those who waste their lives studying the abstract and unchangeable are destined to be inconsequential themselves. I doubt Hodges made too many friends in the philosophy department with this pragmatic worldview.
My fondest memories of Hodges include the time I visited him during office hours and found him sleeping on the ground. When he heard me come in, he sprung to his feet like a laughing teenager and said, “You caught me!” I also chuckle now when I recall his standard first lecture of the semester in which he purposely scared away the close-minded by delivering a frightfully radical diatribe. The friendship I built with Dr. Hodges was very special to me and I was fortunate enough to share a few meals with him at the Pitaria where we discussed life, women, and why no business in the world would ever sell indestructible socks. Dr. Hodges was truly a remarkable professor, and as other students have said of the man, I just flat-out really liked the guy.
When I think back on my time at Florida State University, I will forever remember the image of this tall, thin man with a white beard and a crooked black hat, walking across campus in the austere clothes he wore every day. There goes a true political philosopher, I would say to myself, there goes a consequential man who is leaving his mark on the world. Consequentiality is truly all that matters, Dr. Hodges. Thank you for teaching this to me.
Nick Drummond
Student of Dr. Hodges, 2001-2004
August 31st, 2009 at 8:09PM
Nick: I very much appreciate what you’ve written. I think you’re wrong to get offended, though, by what the journalist has written and what I’ve written. No one’s sullied by a balanced appraisal.
UD
September 4th, 2009 at 10:09AM
Margaret: My issue was not with you or the journalist, but with the blogger comments that appeared on the original article in the Tallahassee Democrat (online). It upset me to see his reputation tarnished by people who never met him.
September 4th, 2009 at 10:10AM
The ironic thing is…Hodges wouldn’t give a damn what anyone said about him.
June 6th, 2013 at 7:30AM
Thank you Nick for your write-up of Don Hodges. I lost contact with Don many years ago but I too loved him, not as a student (I never was his student), but as a comrade. We spent many hours discussing things in my homeland, former Yugoslavia, during the wars of the 90s about which he had been so knowledgeable about.
June 5th, 2016 at 11:44PM
Who can mail me a photograph of my regretted and flamboyant colleague at the FSU philosophy Department Donald Clark Hodges?
June 5th, 2016 at 11:45PM
My mail address is [email protected]
August 11th, 2018 at 8:00AM
I, too, was a student of Hodges, and felt the same way as Nick Drummond.
I was a completely conservative South Georgia wife and mother, but he convinced me to be open minded, look for verification, and look carefully at Marx.
Since I was an Anthropologist going for the Social Philosophy area, much of what he said made good sense to me.
Many times since then (80s) I have changed my views with new information and wished that more people could see the world as radicals ( get to the root). I am now 90 , and continue to see things in his teachings that make sense.
HArd to find anyone who agrees!!!
August 11th, 2018 at 8:21AM
Mary: Many thanks for the comment! UD