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 28th, 2010 at 8:31AM
Nihil sub sole novum, UD. In my first semester of full-time teaching in the 80s, a colleague canceled no fewer than 18 of 40 scheduled classes (I started counting since I had a class in the same room immediately afterward). The same individual the following semester canceled 9 of 14 classes for a seminar.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:02AM
But there IS something new under the sun, tp. Particular professors have of course always done something like this, but I’d argue it’s much more widespread and even formalized in various ways now; and the whole phenomenon of massive numbers of classes in which no one’s really present, even if there’s an event with human beings in it occurring in real time, is new.
January 28th, 2010 at 12:11PM
Rumor has it that there have always been many church services at which a significant % of the attendees pretty much slept through the sermon, liturgy, or whatever, but really wanted be *seen* making their appearance in church…
January 28th, 2010 at 1:29PM
“Add to this, at a sports-mad school like Penn State, plenty of skipping for games, and, well, ain’t much going on in the classroom…”
I’m going to set aside taking offense (and invite you to come to my classroom, if you can keep up), to offer some facts. PSU, like many universities, used to have a Thanksgiving break that started on Wednesday at 5 PM. In a rural area with one small airport and only a few roads out of town, 50,000 people trying to leave town in a few hours was simply chaotic. Not surprisingly, leaving early was common.
Several years ago, a calendar switch moved the Thanksgiving break to a week (removing a fall break, and starting earlier to regain the instructional days). That gave students and faculty plenty of time to get home, if they were traveling. The genesis of this resolution was a meeting between the President and a few students in which some of them mentioned they had a class cancelled. Do we have any information on how widespread this was or if it even is a problem? No, not at all. But, Faculty Senate chose to make what I would call a rather grandstand play.
And yes, I was in class that Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving.
January 28th, 2010 at 1:53PM
I was somewhat over the top, GTWMA. I’m amending the post for less offensiveness.
January 28th, 2010 at 8:39PM
I’m really not offended, UD, just giving you a hard time.