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
August 4th, 2009 at 8:47AM
The source of the funding is not material here. Prestige and further funding alone is more than enough incentive; see, for example, the famous case of HF Schon in physics :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n
But in any event, if you really want to know these things, the acknowledgments are given in the retracted paper:
We thank C. Dean and G. Simpson for clones and advice;
M. Galka for an ABA affinity column; and K. Baron for help with microscopy.
The financial support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada
(to R.D.H.) and Genome Canada (to R.D.H. and S.R.A.) is gratefully
acknowledged.
NSECC is the NSF of Canada, government funding. Genome Canada is a not-for-profit organization with a government mandate.
August 4th, 2009 at 9:15AM
Good points, Shane. And I quoted the ethics professor not because I necessarily agree with him. As you say, motives transcend the corporate/government thing; and in any case NIH support – since it lacks, as far I can tell can tell, much oversight – ain’t pure as the driven snow either.
August 4th, 2009 at 9:46AM
Unfortunately, I have to agree. Senator Grassley’s staff will have years of work when their light shines on NIH/NSF/DOE research. Which is why universities have started to take COI so seriously, I believe. I was on a faculty Senate committee looking over drafts of new policies here at Alabama.
But if you don’t mean to agree with the quoted ethicist, what is your larger point? I’m afraid that it appears you consider this retraction (and there are others of this type) as a kind of bug in the system. I disagree with that view. It is a feature. Peer-review science is self-correcting, as this case makes plainly clear.
Now, a thought-experiment: consider the liberal arts analog. Think of the best, most respected, highest impact peer review journal in an associated field. Has a paper ever been retracted because it is false, unsupported by the evidence, or because the author is tainted by a funding source, or other source of prestige?
Or take it to an extreme. If a Nobel prize winner in the sciences was found to be a fraud–of any stripe–he or she would be stripped of the prize and derided by colleagues down the ages. There is significant evidence that Rigoberta Menchu is a fraud, but the "my truth is…" defense is enough to allow her to keep her Nobel Peace prize. Is one a greater sin than the other? What is the consequence of holding science and scientists to a higher standard of truth?
Just asking.
August 4th, 2009 at 10:17AM
I don’t agree with the blanket statement that corporate involvement in academic science produces a lot of corruption. I do believe that this involvement creates all kinds of very lucrative perverse incentives — the government doesn’t make you rich — that involve not merely the legitimacy of research results (as you point out, science, unlike the humanities, is largely self-correcting) but the whole ghost-writing, CME, pharma-salesman-masquerading-as-university-professor mess.
August 4th, 2009 at 10:59AM
Hmmm…
There are many sub-cultures at play in the sandbox here. So generalization is difficult.
Many of us have students who look forward to finding, ah, jobs. Most of these are in industry. Some of us have worked in industry and even teach our students a little about how research is done in industry vis-a-vis the academic approach.
I believe that the medical school situation is unique. Most docs do not end up working in industry but go to work in private practice, HMOs or universities. Thus the attitude seems to be to squeeze every last nickel out of industry, rather than trying to establish good working relationships to help in the placement of students. (Fifty bucks for a five minute phone call, say.) A 3M consultant who operated this way would not have lasted very long.
ALSO,
having worked at 3M for about ten years-
I would say unequivocally that the general ethical standards at 3M were far higher than those at my university.
Bill Gleason