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
October 28th, 2009 at 9:56PM
> The faculty recommend that
Wow. Imagine if every university in the country were to put such a recommendation in place.
October 29th, 2009 at 9:55AM
But remember, faculty can only recommend.
October 29th, 2009 at 10:11AM
But haven’t large portions of the serious faculty of most universities held positions like this one for a long time anyway, and with little or no result? That Berkeley’s faculty gives their opinion a kind of formal structure with the resolution seems to me to be a very shruggable occurrence.
October 29th, 2009 at 10:50AM
Maybe not, Brett. They won’t get anything near what they want, to be sure, but with the Knight Foundation report in the background, being covered very intensively in the press, and with California’s budget problems, they may get quite a lot.
Plus, that formal structure, and the significant unanimity and activism it suggests on the part of the faculty, is in fact something new.
As a very high-profile university getting serious about athletics spending, Berkeley could be a model for other places.
October 30th, 2009 at 6:30AM
The budget problems are a real motivator. Though I don’t think any big state universities will actually cut marquee sports, there really may be some restructuring of how they’re financed. The current situation simply can’t go on at a lot of places without an honest separation of pools of funds into "athletics" and "other," rather than the weird subsidy of athletics by student fees and presidential discretionary funds. State legislatures are just not going to PROVIDE that kind of presidential slush fund much longer, I figure.
Student fees are a poser. I’ve always thought that some current, disgruntled student should run for state legislature on a "abolish all athletic fees at our state colleges and universities" ticket.
It would make for a fun legislative campaign in a lot of state capital cities where the local state university is a major feature (Madison, Minneapolis, Austin spring to mind).
October 30th, 2009 at 11:23AM
I can see that this might have an impact on the California schools given that state’s budget crunch. And so it might spark some similar moves in some other states if they face the same economic situation.
I don’t believe, though, that it’ll have a widespread impact in a lot of areas, such as mine own Oklahoma home other and parts of the southwest and southeast where football is a very important thing and where most folks have a robust disinterest in actions taken in Berkeley or by the university housed there, whether the actions are sensible or not (Full disclosure: I share a good deal of that disinterest).
I imagine a response something like this: "Get rid of football? You kiddin’ me? Those egghead flakes out there can do what they want but we *ain’t* gettin’ rid of college football!"