… discusses the recent exposure of an anonymous blogger’s identity.
… discusses the recent exposure of an anonymous blogger’s identity.
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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 13th, 2009 at 7:21PM
UD, as someone who cares for language, do you not value the distinction between anonymous and pseudonymous?
June 13th, 2009 at 7:29PM
It doesn’t seem that huge a difference to me, I guess. Both are about hiding your identity. But I’m happy to be corrected on this.
June 15th, 2009 at 11:06AM
It’s largely significant in that many of the attacks made on anonymity—no accountability, don’t know who’s speaking—do not apply to pseudonymous writers who build a reputation and a stance over time and can be called to account in that persona. I would also argue that building such a persona is about more than hiding one’s identity.
Previous conversation:
http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=3749
June 16th, 2009 at 7:36PM
Well. I hadn’t read your full post when I commented previously. The description of the relationship that you cite:
The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.
has nothing to do with knowing a legal name. Pseudonymity carries all of that power. You think that description didn’t apply to the recently outed publius? I have been reading your blog for years, sent you links, engaged in back-and-forths in the comments upon occasion. We are not friends. Whatever relationship has been created here is SOLELY with the presentation upon your blog. You admit this, when you talk about yourself as UD in the post. I refer to you as UD, because that is the persona under which I know you. That Margaret Soltan is a lit prof at GW as opposed to a unnamed lit prof at a big, rich, city university, really doesn’t make much of a difference to me. Bethesda, which IS geographically identifying, means nothing to me, born on the west coast—you could as easily describe it without a name and communicate the same amount.
By failing to recognize that the power of writing you laud has very little to do with the legal name behind it, your analysis of this issue is made incomplete, and your own argument sabotaged.
Sigh. I would actually like to read a REAL attack on pseudonymity, one that doesn’t entirely miss the point, one that doesn’t conflate it with anonymity, that engages the reality of how identities work on the web, and yet still manages to remain hostile.
June 16th, 2009 at 9:41PM
I take your point, Dance, and can only say that I’m guilty of not really having thought about this enough. I’ll do so.
June 17th, 2009 at 6:15PM
Thank you. Appreciate you listening.