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 25th, 2010 at 7:03AM
UD, you have a sort of general lost paradise critique for crookedness in academia. And I think you are likely right – that the university in the 30s and 40s, 50s was a place where less crookedness happened. Not innocent – a prof of mine wrote the first piece on vitamin K, the journal to which he sent it was friendly to another guy, they held my prof’s stuff up with rewrites, the other guy got priority, bang! the other guy got the Nobel for it. But that was unusual.
There’s a lot more at stake, more widely, than there used to be. If you’re thinking about relatedness of microbe families, and eleven other guys in the world care, and you want their good opinion, it’s easier to act honorably than if big pharmaceutical money is riding on predicting which strains will be susceptible to which drugs.
I’m expressing doubt that there is a way back to paradise: we have decided we want to use universities to do the research function as well as the teaching function. And the teaching function itself has a teaching and a credentialing output. There’s a lot of money riding on the research function. People get hired for swell jobs based on their credentials. Disinterested community of scholars is not gonna just HAPPEN. And enforcement mechanisms are going to make the universities less fun.
I love reading your scorn heaped on these dweebs. Maybe, probably, it helps. But I don’t see an obvious path to something better. Constant vigilance, maybe.
November 25th, 2010 at 8:07AM
dave s. – Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I don’t really have a lost paradise model in play — just a sense of what a good university might be. Some universities, in the past and the present, have been good, are good, and these, in a rough sense, should be our models… But I’m also working with a sense of what a good college is, and this differs from the research university you’re describing.
On the matter of places like Alabama A&M – I have no university or college model in mind for them. Their educational mission is close to vanishing (six-year grad. rate at this school is 33%). I’m merely working with a sense of how they might function as collectivities if they were not corrupt.
October 17th, 2015 at 2:09PM
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