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
December 10th, 2009 at 4:36PM
I’d be willing to bet UD’s next month salary that the people who fought against providing a forum for these extremist, nut-case, vicious, haters were labelled Islamophobes, the highest of the high crimes in today’s diverse and multicultural world.
Thank you, UD, for posting this story, and the story about the University of Minnesota thought police. And thank you for pointing out in that post the fact that Americans, far from being the hateful people that most of the world assumes we are, are actually the most culturally flexible and accomodating people in the world. It’s always amusing to me to hear about someone from Iran, or Syria, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia (for fuck’s sake), criticizing the United States for being intolerant. What horseshit.
December 10th, 2009 at 6:39PM
I think it’s better to allow those with extreme views to state them, and see them debated in a reasoned fashion, rather than to quash any such debate because we find the ideas reprehensible. Any truly reprehensible ideas will not stand up to debate. I’m not a fan of silencing unpopular, even hateful, speech because it’s a small step from that to silencing speech we merely disagree with. And a democracy cannot function without free speech — for everyone, good and evil.
December 10th, 2009 at 7:46PM
I appreciate what you’ve said, Patrick, and am very aware of the dangerous slope you describe.
If, though, as you say, truly reprehensible ideas will not stand up to debate, why go through the motions of setting up a debate so that the ideas fall down? That all Jews and homosexuals should be killed; that we should be fascists and destroy every vestige of freedom — how exactly do you go about placing these assertions in the context of a debate?
Democracies, you rightly say, should not silence hateful speech. The question here is whether universities — the privileged arena in almost all cultures of reasoned discourse at its highest — should be host to it, should honor and take it seriously by giving it a place at the university’s table.
The university is under no obligation to do this; indeed, I’d say that the university’s obligation is to understand its own ethos and be true to it — which means, among other things, defending the university from loathsome ideologies, and from the fanatics attached to them.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:54AM
Very nicely stated, UD. Thank you.
December 11th, 2009 at 4:57PM
I see your point. I just disagree. Universities are indeed, in my opinion, under an obligation to speak back to unpopular — and popular — ideas. Intellectual inquiry must be free. If someone were to come to my campus and speak about how all gay people should die, I would — as a gay man — obviously speak against him and his ideas. I’m secure enough to hear his opinion, because I know it’s wrong, mine is right, and I can make the rightness of my opinion obvious to any thinking person.
December 12th, 2009 at 3:07PM
And I see your point, Patrick, but I disagree. I am for the a vigorous marketplace of ideas, except when those ideas are not really ideas at all – just calls for mayhem and death and the destruction of those institutions that have given us the freedom we enjoy today. These are the key notions (not ideas) at the core of the message of today’s Islamo-fanatics.
Of course, I suppose I suffer from Islamophobia, which is what anyone who dares to criticize Islamic extremism suffers from, by definition. Good thing this isn’t a crime under the law, yet…
December 12th, 2009 at 10:17PM
Did I accuse anyone of Islamophobia? I don’t think I accused anyone of anything.
I just expressed a philosophical disagreement. Perhaps you would rather discuss such issues with someone who will accuse you of Islamophobia; if so, I hope you find such an interlocutor.
December 13th, 2009 at 2:25PM
No Patrick you did not accuse me of anything, and I did not accuse you of anything.
Perhaps my sarcasm was difficult for you to follow, since you are so passionate about giving a forum to people who advocate the murder of large groups of others, all under the guise that this is a pleasant exchange of ideas. How civilized, except that in the case of these fanatics you are not dealing with civilized people.
And as an aside, finding someone who would accuse me of intolerance for my position in this matter shouldn’t be difficult at all, because individuals who would make an accusation like that can be found all over the Western left, especially the Western academic left. The same people who would offer a forum to terrorist thugs are OFTEN (not always, Patrick, and anyway I don’t accuse you of being one) the same folks who attempt to intimidate or harass campus speakers or suppress debate about other ideas that don’t fit in their worldview and agenda. If this comes as a surprise to you Patrick, perhaps you should pay closer attention to what’s going on on campus.
December 13th, 2009 at 5:50PM
Well, clearly you’re far too emotional about this to discuss it rationally, so I’ll leave you to it.
December 13th, 2009 at 9:29PM
Well, clearly my comment about Islamophobia (which was made before you even entered the discussion, so it couldn’t have been aimed at you) and my later sarcasm (which again was aimed at the larger contradictions and nonsense here, and not at you) have gotten you more agitated than the prospect of a debate with a group who would like to put you, a gay man, to death, and who would in a blink, if given the chance. I think that’s a pretty rational analysis of what has transpired.
So, please continue to advocate for the rights of these deep thinkers to debate their well-reasoned ideas on campus. Enjoy your debate!
June 27th, 2012 at 7:58AM
[…] of this sort of thing (background here and here). Their universities sponsor events in which speakers call for the death of homosexuals, […]