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
January 11th, 2011 at 10:39AM
There is a big difference between reducing or minimizing the potential liability for reporting a suspected dangerous person, on the one hand, and establishing civil liability or criminal penalties for failing to do so, on the other. The second does in fact represent “cramming these measures down someone’s throat” and opens the door to all kinds of potential witch-hunts and abuse.
January 11th, 2011 at 11:31AM
Galston doesn’t realize how often it goes the other way. My sister does pre-committment assessments, and says that more often than not, when a family brings someone in, it’s the family with the problem, not the person she’s examining.
The nut in Arizona hadn’t done anything to warrant involuntary commitment. He spoke out of turn in class, was socially awkward, and gave people the creeps. Those aren’t grounds for anything. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes people don’t display real symptoms until the big one- you’re just fine, until that aneurysm pops, or until you go on a shooting spree. It’s unfortunate, but that’s life.
January 11th, 2011 at 7:55PM
When I was a youngster, I was given this hypothetical: You have 100 people, one of whom is a violent murderer. You cannot ascertain who he is in these 100 people. What do you do? Do you set them all free or do you detain them all?
I was taught that my society would release them all because it was not right to detain 99 innocent people due to the behavior of one man. And I was taught that Soviet society would detain them all because the behavior of that one individual outweighed everyone else’s rights.
Today we seem to be going more and more to that Soviet style philosophy. Mental health experts cannot predict who will and who will not murder in the future. They have no test for that and they can only make “educated” guesses. But they will be quick to deny 100 people their rights to make sure that one individual does not go free, after all it gives them a market to sell their drugs of dubious benefits. (A favorite topic here on UD.)
That this sort of violence can occur just simply seems to be one of the drawbacks of living in a free society and as bfa says, That’s life.
January 13th, 2011 at 8:50AM
If it were not legal for individuals to own assault handguns and to carry them concealed without a permit, people with this type of mental instability (whether identified and treated or not)would not be able to cause such great damage as Loughner did.
February 14th, 2023 at 7:39AM
[…] partner rejected Va Tech because of the enduring stigma. You can’t forget the way that professor died for his […]