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 23rd, 2011 at 7:20AM
Yale only has three profs on dissertation committees?
March 23rd, 2011 at 7:50AM
Fake your thesis, get a fake diploma? That seems to work.
I attended a small state school for my Ph.D., but was required to have five profs – including one from “outside the department” on my committee.
And yes, I did the research myself and wrote the whole dang dissertation myself. (And gained the 15 “stress pounds” during the process myself)
March 23rd, 2011 at 10:39AM
we also only have three profs on a dissertation committee. it’s not an unusual number.
March 23rd, 2011 at 11:11AM
This could have been any number of students I had in my classes at Brown University. Their rationale seems to be as follows:
1. A degree, like anything and everything else you need or want, is merely a commodity to be purchased.
2. Unlike many other commodities, the price of a degree in not only a certain amount of money, but also a certain amount of academic paper. There are also negotiations with the people who control the product, which differ in no way from negotiations with people in business deals.
3. Just as it doesn’t matter where you got your money, so it doesn’t matter where you got your paper.
4. Negotiations in business need not be conducted with full openness, provided one’s deceit remains hidden while the negotiations are going on. The same is true for negotiations in academia.
5. In business, a deal is a deal once it has been made. If you uncover deceit later, that doesn’t invalidate the deal retroactively. Why should academia differ from business?
6. No other product you purchase requires any mandatory transformation of the buyer. Why should an academic product entail any mandatory transformation, i.e., any actual learning?
All this can probably be summed up as:
Who do academics think they are, to demand anything of students other than what merchants and businessmen demand of their customers?
Of course, in my 40 years at Brown I have taught very, very many wonderful students who do not feel this way. But the attitude I describe above is not all that uncommon, even at an Ivy League university like mine.
March 23rd, 2011 at 11:14AM
Delete “cannot” in the next to the last paragraph of my comment. I shouldn’t try to comment before ingesting sufficient caffein.
March 23rd, 2011 at 12:27PM
Robert: “cannot” deleted.
March 23rd, 2011 at 12:38PM
Thanks!