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
August 19th, 2010 at 8:55AM
It’s really pretty hopeless. The only way to offset the costs of athletic programs is to pump up football revenues, but that never works except at the highest (IA/FBS) level – and not usually there. Women’s sports are the big money-losers overall, and Title IX in effect doubles the cost of football.
But universities try anyway. (There is an academic equivalent, actually, in the maintenance of small, undistinguished PhD programs that – from an administrative viewpoint – promote inefficiency the the deployment of senior faculty).
The more it goes, the more I think that the regulation of athletic scholarships is the only lever that might work to change the situation. That’s because it could achieve the usually irreconcilable twin goals of athletic reform: raising standards/reducing abuses while saving money. Elimination would be a big step forward; so would a return to a four-year funding commitment, although it’s all too easy for opponents to argue that that would add costs.
One salutary effect of either change would be to reduce the influence of coaches and restore some academic control.
August 19th, 2010 at 9:00AM
In case you missed it: administrators, breeding like rabbits
August 19th, 2010 at 9:50AM
And yet, the lie that these athletic programs are profitable often goes unchallenged. In this article today: http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/story/13782714/wisconsin-pushing-for-money-to-build-new-athletic-facility/cbsnews
a WKU sports economist is quoted: “Any time you see places that have 80,000, 90,000 or 100,000 paying all sorts of money to come [to games] and have conference and local TV and radio contracts, those programs are making loads of money,” Western Kentucky University sports economist Brian Goff said. “It makes some sense over some time frame to reinvest your capital and keep yourself competitive against the people you’re trying to recruit against.”
In fact, the number of programs that even showed a paper profit (ignoring all the accounting shenanigans) has dropped in half:
http://californiawatch.org/watchblog/ncaa-report-shows-more-college-athletic-programs-losing-money-1-234
August 19th, 2010 at 10:45AM
It’s easy to “make money” if you use sufficiently-elastic accounting. There are quite a few CEOs and CFOs in prison for long terms for doing just that. I don’t understand what possible reason there could be for accepting less-rigorous accounting in the case of “nonprofit” institutions enjoying special tax treatment, and especially in the case of taxpayer-funded institutions, than in the case of those where shareholders are the ones suffering the effects of bad information.
August 19th, 2010 at 12:29PM
Our AD is very fond of using the word “intangibles” when it comes to discerning the institutional benefits of bleeding millions annually to play unsuccessfully in D-I.
August 19th, 2010 at 1:21PM
My impression is that even most professional teams don’t make money on a day-to-day basis– the really big profits come when a team is sold. This suggests that the sports business is really a sort of pyramid scheme– which suggests, in turn, that the college sports mess will be fixed for good on the day that the scheme collapses.
August 19th, 2010 at 2:55PM
Actually, Matt, I think that’s not the case for professional teams. The accounting incentives run the other direction, so they typically try to hide profit, which reduces their taxes and allows them to plead poverty and the need for publicly financed stadiums. They often are a lot more profitable than they appear to be, something that the independent estimate made by Forbes usually shows. The big profits that are seen when the teams are sold are simply reflective of the underlying true value of the franchise, rather than the phony value often claimed by owners.
Of course, that profit is often achieved through a government supported monopoly for most sports.