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
March 15th, 2011 at 5:48AM
I’m going to resist the idea that these are ‘truly free marketeers’ – these are guys who have figured out how to game government subsidies. That they get them through blighting the hopes and dreams of the folks who take their classes is merely a side effect.
Much of the problem seems to me to stem from the inability to go bankrupt on student loans. I Googled around and found that lawyer Russell Demott has the following up on a bankruptcy site: “Student loans were dischargeable throughout most of the 20th century. In 1976 Congress enacted the Education Amendments, and in section 439A of that Act made student loans non-dischargeable if the first payment came due within five years of bankruptcy unless the debtor could prove “undue hardship.” In 1978, Congress repealed the Bankruptcy Act of 1898 and replaced it with the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978—the “Bankruptcy Act” then became the “Bankruptcy Code.” The bankruptcy Code adopted the Education Amendment provision in original section 523(a)(8): no discharge unless the first payment became due more than five years prior to the bankruptcy filing or the debtor could demonstrate undue hardship.
The call for the non-dischargeability provision in the Education Amendment dated back to the early 1970s. The perceived need for a non-dischargeability provision stemmed from a few extreme cases of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals discharging student loans prior to beginning lucrative careers. The idea was that if the remedy of a bankruptcy discharge was disallowed for five years, those students would become established in their careers and be able to repay their student loans.
Prior to the passage of the Bankruptcy Reform Act in 1978, the House and Senate disagreed strongly about the dischargeability of student loans. The House favored the pre-1976 Education Amendment standard of treating student loans like any other unsecured debt, while the Senate supported the Education Amendment provisions limiting discharge. In the end, however, the Senate won out, and Congress adopted the non-dischargeability provision of the Education Amendment.”
Where I am going with this is, the vampires now making loans to students who will obviously have no prospects of repayment (and let me bring in the sob stories of the students from not-for-profit universities who graduate with degrees called ‘…Studies’ and $100K in debt, too) will stop doing it if bankruptcy discharge becomes possible again. Yes, this will mean that if we want to have LPNs graduate in large numbers we have to pay for public community college programs to get them, but it will cut the bloodsuckers out of the picture and loans will get made only to the people with good prospects for repayment.