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
February 3rd, 2011 at 8:25AM
The problem with all of the universities in Ohio that are not Ohio State is that their students grew up being Buckeye fans. Students at the other universities did not really decide to attend Ohio, Akron, Toledo, Kent, but settled on those universities after not being admitted to Ohio State.
All of the other universities in Ohio would be better off being rid of their athletic teams and just have Ohio State University parties when Ohio State is in the final four or the Rose Bowl.
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:41AM
I believe Super Destroyer offered that observation about the entire Mid-American, with the “not being admitted” argument applicable as well in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. The Mid-American thus hangs around at the fringe of Division I, selling road wins to the Big Ten to raise average attendance and offering tailgating opportunities for home games. Academically, the point of the regional comprehensives once upon a time was to ensure sufficient capacity to offer any state resident finishing in the top third, or the top half, of high school graduating classes, a shot at a higher degree. There’s some academic hanging around as well …
February 3rd, 2011 at 2:46PM
This research indicates that athletics is a big financial drain at schools like those in the MAC. I wish we (Toledo) could give a medal to Katharine Ott, the Toledo student whose work on the athletic parasite burden carried by general fees preceded that of Ridpath and Denhart by a few months.
When I raised this issue with an economics colleague, a big sports fan, his response was that athletics brought in a lot of donations. And as if to prove his point, our neighbor Bowling Green recently received a gift of $10M–all for basketball! [http://bgnews.com/campus/10-million-gift-to-help-basketball-team-1/]
February 3rd, 2011 at 4:11PM
Sometimes the sports bring in the donations — see, for instance, the Yordon Center at Northern Illinois — but sports success doesn’t necessarily bring students — the marketing people at Northern are working to stem losses to Illinois State, about 100 miles away, without a recent bowl victory, but on a train line. I believe there is some economics research on sports-based donations, and there might be some evidence of crowding out.
February 4th, 2011 at 8:17AM
On the bright side, I have it on reliable authority that an attempt by a group of trustees to insert Division I athletics into the first sentence of our mission statement has been beaten back.
We have to look for small victories, right?
February 4th, 2011 at 8:34AM
Stephen
I realized college athletics should be limited to a few schools that have large number of hangers-on when I sat next to an engineer who said he as a huge fan of the Tennessee Volunteers but learned later that he had attended Tennessee-Chattanooga. He could not have cared less about athletics at UT-Chattanooga. Why shouldn’t schools like East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, and UT-Chattanooga just support the flag ship university and give up having their own teams.
The same could be said for Georgia Southern, Troy, UNC-Charlotte, Virginia Commonwealth.
February 4th, 2011 at 4:47PM
Or consider shifting to one of the other divisions in football and basketball. Illinois State, Southern, and Western all play in the Missouri Valley, which has slots in the main basketball tournament, but which participates in a football championship more organized and less tainted than the bowl championship series. The former Wisconsin teachers’ colleges used to have something called the Wisconsin State University Conference, which participates in a different football championship that’s settled around Thanksgiving. You keep some of that collegiate atmosphere and provide an opportunity for future band directors to learn something about marching band — an alleged economy of scope in the teacher preparation area — without as much corrupting influence as is present in the so-called power conferences that allegedly (count the Mid American Conference representation in the Super Bowl) serve as development leagues for the pros to the exclusion of education.