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 18th, 2009 at 8:18AM
I don’t know why, but this post brought home to me the utter futility of a lot of complaining about higher ed these days. Here’s the thing that our columnist missed: nobody cares, and nobody has any incentive to change things. Administrators? They like the fact that they are getting a lot of classes taught on the cheap, instead of having to commit significant resources to a tenure-line appointment. The faculty? They might "deplore" the situation, but changing it would require that the actually teach more classes, so they won’t be doing anything to alter the status quo. Parents? Don’t really care that much, either; few actually believe in the importance of a degree in English (philosophy, sociology…take your pick); they just want to ensure that the kid gets a college degree, and an inexpensive one at that (thanks, FSU!). Current undergrads? Essentially powerless; most aren’t paying the freight, and those who do sense that they have been deprived of a first-rate education will graduate and leave soon enough. Oh, and our graduate student and his/her peers? Powerless again, and just one more soul who is only now waking up to the harsh realities of graduate education; maybe 20 years ago s/he would have an excuse for ignorance, but who today can go to grad school without having been warned?
Sorry to be such a downer–but nothing in this post is remotely surprising to anyone who has kept an eye on graduate education since the early 1990s, and reading (roughly) the same complaints again and again just drives home to me the fact that nothing is going to change.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:02AM
monboddo: You need to add, in the case of FSU, bread and circuses to keep the fools happy. Sports galore, so people stay drunk and stupid.
OTOH: I disagree that things can’t change. They can. And they do.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:10AM
Every faculty adviser should have a heart-to-heart meeting with undergraduates planning to pursue advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences with the idea of a university teaching career–preferably one that ends with fear, trembling, tear-stained cheeks, and a wastebasket full of snotty tissues. The first five times that Lucy pulls the football out from Charlie Brown, I blame her. After that, Charlie Brown gets the dope slap. The business plans of the big research universities have been transparent for a long time. Things won’t change until more students say "no."