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
September 17th, 2009 at 9:48AM
Margaret (if I may),
Although I am not a criminal defense lawyer, I have returned to thinking about criminal law in the last few years, and my understanding is that within the general category of homicide, there are many different variations based mostly but not exclusively on the mens rea of the defendant. Thus, if the defendent acted recklessly as opposed to knowingly (as defined by the relevant jurisdiction’s law), the defendant can typically only be found guilty of manslaughter as opposed to murder.
So whether a murder is premeditated may suffice to distinguish one class of murder from another, but if the defendant knowingly murdered the victim, which seems plausible based on the facts as they are being reported here, he would still be facing a murder charge, as opposed to manslaughter, etc. There are different kinds of murder under most state laws, with different sentence ranges, and different standards of proof.
All of the above JMO, and criminal law experts may be able to correct any errors or fill in any gaps.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:51AM
Thank you, Daniel. That helps me understand this.
Margaret
September 17th, 2009 at 2:21PM
I’m not a lawyer, but I agree with Daniel. My layperson’s sense is that a murder like this, committed in the heat of anger, is generally charged as second-degree murder.
For first-degree murder, the prosecution has to prove premeditation, "malice aforethought." That premeditation is part of the legal definition of first-degree murder. And I don’t know how you could prove that, since the accused man doesn’t seem to have planned, has left no record of prior threats, and can’t be proved to have sought out poor Le. (He didn’t go someplace where he would not otherwise be in order to attack her.)
But the way he killed her leaves him on the hook for more than manslaughter. Manslaughter is for causing the victim’s death without necessarily intending it. But it’s basically impossible that someone who strangled Le, and whom she was trying to fight off, wasn’t trying to kill her while he did it.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:48PM
Minnesota law defines first degree murder as an intentional killing committed with premeditation. An act is intentional when the actor either has a purpose to do the thing or cause the result specified or believes that the act, if successful, will cause that result. Intent may be inferred from the manner of the killing.
Premeditation is a state of mind generally proved through circumstantial evidence by drawing inferences from the words and actions of the defendant in light of the totality of the circumstances. Premeditation can be inferred if there is: (1) planning activity shown by the actions of the defendant prior to the actual killing; (2) motive inferred from the prior relationship of the defendant with the victim; or (3) evidence as to the nature of the killing from which it can be inferred that the killing was premeditated.
Premeditation does not require any specific time period.
See, State v. Cruz-Ramirez, 2009 Minn. Lexis 548 (Minnesota Supreme Court August 27, 2009).
Michael W. McNabb
Attorney at Law (former state prosecutor)
September 17th, 2009 at 10:03PM
What about hiding the body? Does that change the type of charge?
September 18th, 2009 at 1:10AM
"The panicked stupidity of his response to what he had done"? I don’t see any discussion of his response in the article at all. What was his response?
September 18th, 2009 at 1:54AM
I’m referring to his having hidden the body in a very shallow opening in a wall of the building. This made it easy for a cadaver dog to find. And to his having hidden his bloody clothes just behind some ceiling tiles — also easily discovered by smell.