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
November 11th, 2009 at 11:25AM
Hmmm…
I note that this is a Catholic institution. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I am not sure that these thoughts apply universally.
Frankly, when I teach organic chemistry, I think my worldview, ethics, values, and hopes and dreams are irrelevant. I would have been offended if my organic chem prof went into these in his course.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:46AM
An ethical move by another institution, regarding another Soltan.
November 11th, 2009 at 12:01PM
I teach Ethics — philosophical ethics. It seems to me that my purpose is to help students understand philosophical arguments, not push my positions on them. I try not to tell them what I really think on any given applied ethics issue.
IMHO, this sounds like a Parker Palmer off-shoot — this was a hot fad at my CC several years ago, and was way too emotional for me.
November 11th, 2009 at 2:26PM
This strikes me as more than a little bit narcissistic.
In "A Preface to Paradise Lost," C S Lewis contrasts the characters of Adam and Satan, as developed in Milton’s work:
"Adam talks about God, the Forbidden tree, sleep, the difference between beast and man, his plans for the morrow, the stars and the angels. He discusses dreams and clouds, the sun, the moon, and the planets, the winds and the birds. He relates his own creation and celebrates the beauty and majesty of Eve…Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace ‘all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.’ Satan has been in the heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan.."
And that “one thing” is, of course, Satan himself…his position and the wrongs he believes have been done to him.
"Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament…"
Elsewhere, Lewis refers to "the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of Hell."
One doesn’t need to believe in Hell or Satan to see the force of these points. There is indeed something disturbing about the person who has to endlessly relate everything in the universe directly to himself.
Ever noticed that weather announcements are not "THE weather" anymore? Now it has to be "YOUR weather."
Rev Holmes assertion strikes me the same way.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:41PM
(Just engaging in some Socratic dialectic.)
>More on Ethics and the Classroom
Does UD believe the classroom is the only place that a university teaches? If we conclude that ethics cannot or should not be taught in the classroom, might it be taught, or should it be taught, or is it being taught, in other ways and places by a university?
November 11th, 2009 at 7:16PM
A university is a community of serious people – people who want to think about important things with one another. The ethos of the university is implicit in all of the formal academic pursuits of the community — reading, discussing things, being tested, writing, doing research — as well as in pursuits not as formal as classroom activity — living together, eating together, attending with fellow students arts events or political talks on campus, writing for the campus newspaper, being political activists of one sort or another, volunteering in various ways, etc. All of these activities carry the essential commitment of the members of a university to free and serious thought, meaningful discourse, a collective effort toward enlightenment.
This is the ethics that the university can teach — if you want to put it that way — a selfless, non-materialistic, respectful interest in the history of ideas, in one’s own ideas, and in the ideas of others.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:03PM
> The ethos of the university is implicit in all of the formal academic pursuits of the community … as well as in pursuits not as formal as classroom activity — living together, eating together …
UD channels Samuel Eliot Morison and the Puritans:
"Book learning alone might be got by lectures and reading; but it was only by studying and disputing, eating and drinking, playing and praying as members of the same collegiate community, in close and constant association with each other and with their tutors, that the priceless gift of character could be imparted."
But is this what The University does today?
March 8th, 2010 at 10:42PM
[…] Catholic, so it features things like The Heart of the University Retreat Series: The Heart of the University Retreat Series gives faculty and administrators of all faiths the […]