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 27th, 2010 at 1:22AM
The problem with this is that the association with a university is what pulls in so many people at the big sports universities. The University of Michigan football team can pull in 100,000 fans per game because of its association with university life. If athletes are allowed to get too many perks it could alienate the fan base.
I know most university sports franchises don’t attract enough attendees to be profitable but imagine how much less profitable they would be without being associated with a university. Marketing would be a much tougher sell.
Besides, universities have found a way to get thousands of people willing to give them exorbitant amounts of money. They get so much money from these dupes that they can subsidize the sports franchise. The rest of us get to enjoy quality athletics without having to fork over money. That’s what the dupes are for.
A good university president is someone who understands that the dupes are needed but also understands that you don’t spend too much on the dupes because then you have less money to spend on training facilities, stadiums, etc. On the other hand you don’t want to give the players too much money or freedom. That breeds complacency and performance suffers. You get better performance from the players from the hope of someday getting a big payday in the big leagues. It’s a complicated system and that’s why a good university president is worth his/her weight in gold.
July 27th, 2010 at 10:55AM
I thought you might like this article, as it seems to apply:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700051047/Utah-colleges-spend-more-on-sports.html?pg=1
excerpt:
“Indeed, a national debate is heating up in higher education over the balance between funding for athletics and academics. However, Utah’s colleges are largely on the sidelines, with officials expressing little enthusiasm for cutting athletics programs even as their overall budgets saw a 12.5 percent decrease in state funding last year.
And in most cases, they say it hasn’t been much of an issue on campus, even as athletics spending has grown: from $12.8 million at Utah State University in 2006-07 to $17.8 million just two years later, and from $5.7 million to $7.2 million at Southern Utah University in that same period.
“It comes up every year in the regular budget cycle,” said Paul Brinkman, vice president for budget and analysis at the U. “It hasn’t really been a hot item. There’s been no knock-down, drag-out struggle over it.”
Story continues below
Brinkman said he hopes the U. doesn’t get “caught up in the extraordinary levels of funding” seen at other schools in the Pac-10.”
See, it’s not even an issue. Athletic spending goes up, academic spending goes down, and no one really bats an eye. It’s not an issue.
July 27th, 2010 at 2:04PM
conservativeEnglish PhD: Many thanks for that comment, and for the link to the article, which I’ll now read in full. UD