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
July 7th, 2009 at 8:22PM
"Recent statistics from the Mount Nittany Medical Center in State College, Pennsylvania, indicate that the excessive drinking behavior often associated with Spring Break is not confined to the time students spend off campus, and instead persists throughout the year at alarming levels. Choose Responsibility, an organization determined to address the binge drinking culture in America, recognizes the need to address this growing problem before it gets worse.
In 2008, emergency room personnel working near the campus of Penn State University treated a record number of students for alcohol related problems. These hospital visits were so common that the total number of students treated increased 84% since 2005. In addition, the average blood alcohol level of students seeking treatment rose from 0.234 to 0.252 percent, more than three times the legal limit for intoxication."
And
"As one of the year’s major student partying occasions approaches, Penn State University officials point to what they hope are sobering statistics about a rise in alcohol-related emergency room visits by students.
They hope to keep St. Patrick’s Day intoxication down to a dull roar, as well as the related Penn-State-specific celebration of "State Patrick’s Day" coming up on Saturday.
Despite alcohol-education initiatives on campus and in downtown State College, Vice President for University Relations Bill Mahon says 313 Penn State students sought alcohol-related emergency room care at Mount Nittany Medical Center between August and December of 2008. That’s up more than 100 from the same period in the fall of 2007.
The university counted 558 ER visits for alcohol-related problems during all of 2008, a startling jump from 304 three years earlier in 2005."
Dear Spencer: It’s a trend, and not just at UF. I like alcohol. I have some nearly every night. But, this isn’t behavior any University President, faculty member, or student should ignore. It’s dangerous and destructive. And, there are some well-tested solutions, like reducing the number of outlets.
However, since you want to turn a blind eye to it, I’ll suggest a compromise. The next time a University President has to call a family to tell them their son or daughter died from binge drinking, you get to do the honors.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:51AM
The Georgia Florida game isn’t really the best place to try to change the culture of student drinking on campus. The game isn’t even held on either campus, without getting into how what takes place at relatively few football games actually shapes the behavior of students on non-game days.
If we’re talking about student drinking at Georgia, I’m not convinced that more students are drunk on game day than are drunk on any given Friday night. The games do bring on the additional problem of drunk alumni and fans, but that’s a different issue from the "next time a University President has to tell them their son or daughter died" as you rather emotionally made your argument.
Relatively few students actually attend the Georgia Florida game, compared to the number of alumni or fans who never attended the schools; in fact, current students have to participate in campus ticket lotteries in the hopes of getting tickets. (I’m not sure how this works today, but fewer students seems to get tickets to games than they used to) Universities can make a lot more money selling them to non-students.
College presidents can try to focus their efforts on events like the one referred to as the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party in the hopes of changing the image of certain singular events, but the connection between that and binge drinking on campus remains to be seen.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:04PM
http://www.oir.uga.edu/reports/gradechg_1105.pdf
I was looking for information about enrollment at UGA to check what I said about fewer students getting tickets, and I really can’t be sure.
But that link has some interesting grade and test score trends at UGA.