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
July 21st, 2010 at 8:08AM
To be honest, UD, I think that you are getting played. As one of my lawyer friends says, anybody can sue just about anybody for just about anything. Getting it past the filing stage and into court, let alone winning the case is orders of magnitude more difficult. This is about a playwright working some PR; undoubtedly the “sexually tinged memory of Wiesel’s time in a concentration camp” was designed to evoke just such a response. Read between the lines here:
“Ms. Margolin said she had initially hoped that Mr. Wiesel would find the play compelling and thoughtful. But after she sent him a copy, Mr. Wiesel replied with a letter in April, saying he found the play to be “obscene” and “defamatory,” and in which he threatened to enlist his lawyers to stop its production. According to Ms. Margolin and her lawyer, Mr. Wiesel and his foundation’s representatives never specified what they considered obscene or defamatory.”
Wiesel’s attorney sent the ritual “we’re gonna sue you” letter that she had hoped to elicit. The fact that they did not offer specifics of their objections is a good sign that they knew perfectly well that it would not fly in court. That a Yalie faculty member, wired into the East Coast academic-cultural elite, is worried about getting legal representation for such an obvious non-starter of a suit is laughable.
July 21st, 2010 at 9:03AM
I suppose you might be right, tp, but I doubt it.
For starters, this Yalie faculty member is, if I’m not mistaken, far from a tenured well-paid sort — She’s got a Yale connection, to be sure, but it’s a pretty tentative one (I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong about this).
Second, Wiesel may have real reasons to be worried about this play drawing attention to his Madoff connection. At the very least, continued attention to his deep financial involvement with Madoff could damage his morally impeccable reputation. Of course he knows a lawsuit isn’t likely to go far. All he needs to do — all he did — was threaten one.
Wiesel is a massively wealthier, better connected, and more influential person than Margolin. She had – and still has – plenty of reason to fear him.
July 21st, 2010 at 10:02AM
As is usually the case with well-known playwrights/creative writers, she is an adjunct professor, but her connection is prominently played up on her Yale Theater Dept. page. She is not some prole who is going to lack for an attorney. As a public figure, Wiesel also would have the additional burden of proving malice, not only falsehoods. If she were really worried about getting sued, would she so thinly re-write the play that the Wiesel-type character remains so obvious? She is about as “deeply shaken” by this as I am by Dean Cruella DeVile accusing me of “unfairly judging” administrators.
Wiesel has every reason to be cautious about people using his name to make money. There are plenty of anti-Semitic kooks and Holocaust deniers who will be happy to run with her fictional “sexually tinged memory of Wiesel’s time in a concentration camp” and use it to discredit him.
July 21st, 2010 at 1:16PM
Wiesel is Good Guy (TM), Margaret. Don’t “threaten the narrative.”