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
November 23rd, 2010 at 8:47AM
I have a problem with using university employees as babysitters, but as far as whether he wants a chief of staff or some other flunkie? Who cares? I also think that the whole charade of creating some make-work position for presidential spouses should end. If the first ladies or first dudes are willing to do the whole presidential spouse thing and attend scores of rubbery scrambled egg breakfasts and rubber chicken lunches, simply give them a salary of 1/3 of the president’s, up to some reasonable maximum.
November 25th, 2010 at 12:33AM
1) Theoretically, using university employees as babysitters should count as a perk. So is hiring a spouse as a university employee. All this should be reviewed and approved by the Board and officially reported somewhere.
2) The University may have a legal obligation to follow free-speech guidelines for students and employees. So confidentiality agreements should be reviewed by the University’s legal counsel and approved by the Board. Also, many nonprofits are subject to whistleblower laws (to protect whistleblowers), so this is another reason to get a legal opinion and Board approval.
Of course, just because something has been reviewed and approved by lawyers and the Board, and is legal, doesn’t necessarily make it right. It has to pass a smell test.
None of this passes the smell test for me.
Although it’s quaint to think that the actions of Presidents and Boards should be motivated by ethics or at least propriety, I don’t think there’s any reason to assume this, in real life. For instance, if a President does something wrong and is fired, he’ll get a small mountain of money. So his motivation is focused on legality. He doesn’t want to commit a felony, to land in jail and to forego the pot of gold waiting at the end of the firing rainbow.
The Board’s motivation is to avoid bad publicity. This is why they make vacuous announcements and have phoney investigations. The point of having an investigation is not to FIND something, but to COVER IT UP.