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
July 16th, 2011 at 12:54PM
So much for close reading of a text: the headline itself indicates it is her husband’s business that is involved in this tidy piece of muckracking. Michele Bachmann is a tax lawyer by training, I believe.
July 16th, 2011 at 4:51PM
Shane: My understanding is that it is a business co-owned by Bachmann and her husband. I’m happy to be corrected. But here’s a source:
He built the counseling business they now own together.
July 17th, 2011 at 12:41AM
So what’s the problem? He’s not a pointy headed intellectual?
And what’s wrong with a wife owning part of her husband’s legal business? She’s supposed to divorce him because his PhD coursework wasn’t rigorous enough?
Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t remember you covering Michelle Obama’s job with the U of Chicago after she flunked the Illinois Bar. Maybe Mrs. Obama’s job might have be off limits because she wasn’t running for president. But then neither is Dr. Bachmann.
July 17th, 2011 at 4:03AM
AYY: It’s perfectly fair game to point out that a candidate has a business in which employees are misrepresenting themselves as actual PhDs when in fact they have fraudulent degrees. As to Bachmann’s husband’s borderline degree — again, there are legitimate ethical questions here in terms of his qualifications for dispensing counseling advice. All of it goes to her sense of business ethics, and all of it will certainly be written about and discussed in the course of her campaign.
It will, of course, be overshadowed by controversies involving the candidate’s comments about gays (also her husband’s comments), and whether the clinic practices reparative therapy.
July 18th, 2011 at 5:42AM
I used to serve on the faculty of the Union Institute. It is a non-residential Ph.D. program for adults, with North Central accreditation. It was not a diploma mill: students did course work, residential seminars, and wrote dissertations. While there was sloppy work that got through the system (a faculty committee had made such an argument a few years before the Ohio Board of Regents went after Union) the Ohio Board of Regents report exaggerated the extent of the problem.
I don’t know the Minnesota regulations, but often you can call yourself a “psychologist” or “counselor” without being licensed. Licensure rules vary enormously. This is a warning to check the qualifications of mental health practitioners — though even those who are properly licensed may be incompetent.
July 18th, 2011 at 7:06AM
Susan: Thanks very much for those details. I was careful in the post not to call Union a diploma mill. Argosy certainly is, and I called it that.
Whatever the crazy regs in Minnesota for licensing of – as you rightly put it – “psychologist” or “counselor” – the story in this case is about Michele Bachmann’s co-ownership of a shoddy enterprise.