February 3rd, 2025
‘Severely underutilized [federal] buildings can also pose heath risks to their occupants, as GSA recently discovered with Legionella outbreaks in many of its buildings when water stagnated in their plumbing systems from underutilization.’
We had fed the Fed on fantasies
The Fed's grown fecal from the fare,
Stagnation in amenities
Breeds microbes everywhere. Oh, GS-bees
Come build in the empty house of the State.

October 9th, 2013
C’mon in! There’s always room for one more!

Yeshiva University apparently has not had its fill of sex scandals for the year.

February 4th, 2013
It’s not just one event. It’s…

… context. You look at a school like Syracuse University, which had a bad on-campus brawl early Sunday morning (major fighting; several arrests), and you ask yourself What else? What’s it been like on that campus for the last few months? You scroll through various corruption and violence related posts that pop up on this blog when you type syracuse into UD‘s search engine…

And it’s clear that Syracuse has got what you call a trend.

August 21st, 2012
“According to The Tennessean, Tennessee State University’s accreditation is at risk this year unless it proves professors adequately test students, administrators make results-driven decisions and instructors have the right credentials to teach their subjects. The university is in the first stage of its Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accreditation renewal process. In past years, other outside groups gave TSU scathing reviews for lacking an evidence-based culture and not providing basic services.”

So that was a couple of years ago at Tennessee State, and as is customary with schools that graduate not much over ten percent of their students in four years, the place since then has sort of kept limping along, barely getting re-accredited in time for more incompetence.

Now the school has devolved into farce, with the head of the faculty senate led away in handcuffs from a meeting about allegations (apparently now disproved) that the administration went into the computer system and changed (improved) student grades. The meeting was also about the results of a faculty survey having to do with whether to dismiss the head of the senate.

But the details are unimportant. These are the sorts of deeply humiliating events which occur in dropout factories.

June 1st, 2012
The University of Missouri…

… really knows how to pick ’em.

[Kenneth] Rall quietly resigned as chairman of the [University of Missouri] radiology department in December shortly before word got out that the radiology department [was] under scrutiny [for Medicare fraud].

His past was marked by trouble.

Rall was convicted of misdemeanor stealing in the 1980s for signing over Medicaid refund checks to himself while working at a Columbia radiology company. He had faced steeper felony charges, but the prosecutor lost evidence days before the trial. Rall also paid back nearly $1 million from a check-kiting scheme that used lag time between banks to inflate one account balance with non-existing funds from another account.

Rall left town in the midst of the controversy in the mid-80s but returned and went to work for the University of Missouri School of Medicine in 1998. When the school recruited him back, administrators knew about his past legal issues, spokesman Rich Gleba previously told the Tribune.

May 23rd, 2012
South Carolina.

One wild and crazy state.

March 3rd, 2009
Beyond Deplorable

The only med school in the country on probation, George Washington University refuses to release the accreditor’s report detailing its problems. In an editorial, GW students call for its release.

Most schools who’ve been on probation, or have had some trouble with the accrediting group, released their report.

Why is GW the exception? If the [agency] report [in 1999] called the conditions at Stanford “deplorable” – and it was not even put on probation – how much worse must it be in Foggy Bottom?

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

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