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
March 29th, 2009 at 12:20PM
That is pure awesome. St Olaf has a fun video about their team at . Sounds like they did it for the love of the thing, not to get a job or even just prove their coolness.
March 29th, 2009 at 12:21PM
bah, comments ate my url. http://fusion.stolaf.edu/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=NewsDetails&id=4587 ?
March 29th, 2009 at 2:49PM
[Mine may have gotten eaten by the spam filter also. I repost it because I think there’s potential here for a new kind of organization, which UD could form just by documenting clever and intelligent college competitions, like the one in this post. It could become a Clever Collegiate Competition Association (or something), with UD as czarina, eventually surpassing Miles Brand in influence.]
Stories like this are really encouraging — they give me hope that the natural competitive spirit can be cultivated by universities in an intelligent and constructive way. If university leaders would pay more attention to this sort of thing rather than to the Notoriously Corrupt Athletic Association, the world would be a better place.
Here are some more examples:
– A world chess championship sponsored by the University of Malaya
– A fierce spelling bee at Princeton ("What the hell is a kinkajou?")
– An international scrabble tournament at the University of Malaya (they know how to do it right).
– The Chariots of Fire foot-race at Cambridge University, in which the participants *pay* to run, with the proceeds going to charity.
I’d be pleased to heard of similar examples, in particular ones that cost almost no money and that can be made into inter-university or inter-college competitions, and that may be given some intellectual and/or historical content.
Perhaps UD would like to start an open post and assemble a list, to illustrate the positive things universities could do to replace of the existing corrupt sports regime? If sports corruption is to be eliminated, a positive replacement must be already in hand; UD could be the focal point for developing such replacements.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:28AM
Sounds like a lot of great physics here.
Go Oles. (I say this as a former instructor at the non-Lutheran college in Northfield.)