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
January 9th, 2010 at 10:26AM
‘“Mr. Marr,” I said, civilly, “I’m glad we live in a country where you’re free to express your views. I don’t think you’re a bad person….’
Buy yourself a clue, you dope. He IS a bad person.
January 10th, 2010 at 12:14PM
You seem to be hitting the same note you did a few days ago in the context of radical Islamic speeches in the UK: you equate a university’s toleration of offensive speech to endorsement of that speech.
UO’s first statement was the correct answer: these talks don’t reflect our opinion. “Groups such as this that use University facilities from time to time do not speak for the University of Oregon. Nor does the appearance of any invited speaker or the use of our facilities imply the institution’s endorsement, support, or even its moral indifference to the content of a message.” You describe that as “badly worded,” but it appears unusually straightforward compared to the pablum that usually comes from the pens of university presidents.
You ask “What kind of policy forces a school to host brown shirts?” In the case of GWU, a private university, it’s academic freedom and open mindedness. You endorsed those virtues when you wrote that you wouldn’t want GW’s president to ban any sort of speech. Although you were referring to radical Islamic speech, the principle would apply to the Pacifica Forum, too, wouldn’t it?
In the case of UO, a public university, it’s also the First Amendment. Once the university provides a forum, as by allowing retirees free meeting space, it can’t constitutionally regulate content. Contrary to popular belief, there’s no exception in the First Amendment for hate speech. The Brown Shirts enjoy the same free speech rights as English professors.
UO could expand on its position by specifically criticizing the reported statements, and faculty and students could protest the meetings or (more productively) express contrary opinions in other forums — in short, they could exercise their own free speech rights. What they shouldn’t do, and what you shouldn’t encourage, is to deprive others of their rights.
January 10th, 2010 at 12:47PM
Actually, what I should have made more explicit is my confusion as to why the university seems to feel it’s compelled to give emeritus professors access to campus for their meetings.
There are many ways, short of formally banning speech, to discourage behavior (and we can tussle as to whether a roomful of people doing a Nazi salute is speech) that is profoundly at odds with the values of universities.
*************************
Here’s an update on the UO situation.
January 10th, 2010 at 1:18PM
Oh, OK. Content-neutral restrictions are more likely to be constitutional. That doesn’t eliminate the issue, though. If a public university rents out facilities, it can’t rent only to those whose speech it favors. So the same group could continue to meet just by paying the rental fee that anyone else would pay. And if the university provides free rooms for current faculty or students, the group would just need a different sponsor. Finally, a public university can’t impose unduly strict time or place restrictions, either. Lots have tried to limit “free” speech to a certain remote area during certain limited times. Fortunately groups like FIRE challenge those restrictions in court and win.