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 22nd, 2009 at 4:51PM
Well, there’s putting Terry Eagleton out to pasture at 65 and then there’s the professor here who prefaces every note to the president of the Colleges with "I have been teaching here since before you were born."
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:53PM
Absolutely, Michael. None of this is to defend retaining actual coots.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:04PM
Took me a minute to figure out that the headline was not meant literally. (What harm has Fulica atra ever caused?)
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:12PM
Yale had mandatory retirement at age 70 until it became illegal (in 1993!)– and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same sort of thing happened elsewhere. Yes, American universities will generally do the right thing with respect to age discrimination– and if they don’t, they’ll get sued.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:52PM
My Polish colleagues are absolutely amazed that we don’t make faculty and staff retire at 65. "What if they, you know, get a little ga-ga?" they ask. Not a problem, I say. We just have them advise the occasional senior thesis and keep a close eye on them otherwise. Sometimes, they just talk about the Golden Age, which is inevitably 25 years before the present moment, and sometimes they produce a brilliant book. We can’t predict one way or the other. Occasionally they’ll accept a retirement offer they can’t refuse, and occasionally we have to carry them out horizontally. But in general, we value their wisdom and experience. The Poles are simultaneously aghast and envious.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:53PM
I anticipated you might do that, RJO.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:58PM
Polish Peter: Admittedly, they can get ga-ga. That is a risk. I recall, many years ago, at who knows what university, a very elderly professor interrupting a faculty discussion of new course requirements with a long description of a tea he had with the Queen Mother.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:21PM
John B. Fenn was forced to retire at Yale at age 70 in 1987. He moved to Virginia Commonwealth University and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2002/fenn-lecture.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bennett_Fenn
September 22nd, 2009 at 8:46PM
Cambridge also forced Quentin Skinner to retire. He was picked up immediately by Queen Mary University of London, where he is said to be very happy. Meanwhile my own colleague Robert Darnton, older than Skinner, was lured to take up a new many-hour-a-day job as librarian of Harvard. As an incipient coot, I prefer our system–but I wish we had an actual way to deal with abuses, instead of just hoping that the dean can charm the useless coots out of the trees and into retirement, and I can’t see what form it could take.
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:21PM
Canadian universities are slowly overturning the requirement to retire at 65. This is a very good thing, because after the last financial meltdown took its bite out of my retirement savings, I will likely need to work to age 90 to be ABLE to retire.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:25PM
Tom: LOL.
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:06PM
I remember a concerned department chair here grabbing a younger faculty member at commencement and assigning him to prevent the department’s oldest member from wandering off on the procession in.
September 24th, 2009 at 4:50PM
I have to say, by far my worst grad school professors are also the ones who are over 75. 65 might be a bit early, but I can definitely see where they’re coming from. My favorite quote from my octogenarian econ professor – "’Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ – what is that from, the Bible?"
More witticisms of his (from one class!) can be found here: http://cherrispryteaintsobrite.tumblr.com/post/184870546/i-am-paying-a-crazy-person-to-teach-me-economics
Sometimes the brain just starts to go.
September 24th, 2009 at 5:06PM
Absolutely true, Mary Anne. Universities need ways of getting those whose brains have started to go out of the classroom. But I don’t think mandatory retirement is the answer.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:47PM
Well no, I suppose making it mandatory isn’t a good idea. But there ought to be some sort of structured weeding-out process. Like how people over a certain age need to take driving exams more often.
September 30th, 2009 at 11:07AM
MIT found the solution: move their offices to a Gehry building and let the vertigo do the dirty work.
September 30th, 2009 at 11:26AM
Omri: Funny!
November 25th, 2009 at 4:18PM
Coming in late on this, but the issue looks rather different to those of us just entering the profession. And it seems to me to be no coincidence that the retirement age is being questioned in Commonwealth countries just as the baby boomers start to reach 65. Entry-level academic jobs are scarce enough; the idea of them being made even scarcer because of individuals loftily regarding their academic positions as life appointments is pretty galling to anyone under, say, 35. At some point, the baton must be passed. Otherwise, there’ll be no one around to receive it when it finally drops from the cold, dead hands of the academic gerontocracy.