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 26th, 2011 at 9:29AM
Presidents ceded control of the NCAA to ADs a generation ago; and in any case the athletic powerhouses are in control because they (through the men’s basketball tournament) pay for everything. No help there.
The only power within higher education capable of reining in athletics is accreditation – but it’s too blunt an instrument.
The BCS system, which virtually assures that all schools in the AQ conferences will at least break even, eliminated the economic imperative for systemic reform. The Ivy experiment basically failed (in part because the issues changed), so even piecemeal reform looks unlikely.
Maybe the IRS really is the only hope.
March 26th, 2011 at 9:42AM
There is a solution that would enable a university to disentangle itself from the big business of major sports while allowing those programs to continue. Organize the football and basketball teams as separate corporations. The university would grant a license to those corporations to use the name of the university for the teams. The fee for the license would be a percentage of the revenues the corporations generate from ticket sales, broadcasting rights, advertising, etc. The university would use part of the license fee to support the non-revenue sports it decides to retain, such as track and swimming. This is a solution that would enable the sports fans to continue to enjoy the games and would enable the university to focus on its academic mission–the reason for its existence.
Even the NCAA is beginning to recognize that universities cannot sustain the current financial system for sports. See Up, Up and Away at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/ncaa.
See also Restoring the Balance: Dollars, Values and the Future of College Sports at http://www.knightcommission.org.
For a spectacular example of the misplaced priorities on sports (and the concurrent destructive effect on academics) at the University of Minnesota see section 5 of University Inc. Part II at http://ptable.blogspot.com/2011/02/draft-as-university-transforms-itself.html#links.
March 26th, 2011 at 1:35PM
Seems to me that the selection and retention criteria for university presidents make it unlikely for them to do *anything* requiring high levels of courage. If a president rocks the boat and pisses lots of people off–even/especially people who *need* to be pissed off–with the idea of markedly improving education at that institution, how long will it take before his initiatives begin to have a real impact AND for that impact to be recognized and him to get any credit for them? 10 years, maybe? If the time constant of being able to improve results in a recognizable way is greater than the time it takes your enemies to get rid of you, then transformational against-the-grain change is unlikely to happen.
See related thoughts from Captain Reginald Whinney, RN, on what he calls “promotion jobs.”