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
August 17th, 2011 at 3:06PM
God, please let it be so. This is Gilligan’s ticket out of D-I right into D-III.
August 17th, 2011 at 5:08PM
It won’t happen. There aren’t 50 schools with profitable football operations. I’d be surprised if there are 20. And many of those 20 will have hidden costs picked up by the university in general. Perhaps even Alabama football would be unprofitable under GAAP. Basketball is a bit better. Its costs are lower and there are more revenue events, but even so I’d doubt there are 50 schools where basketball makes money.
The truth is that minor league football requires the cover of non-profit universities and subsidies from them to continue to exist.
It would, of course, be a good thing if it did happen. Not least because its impact on other university sports would be amazingly positive. But it won’t.
August 18th, 2011 at 2:45PM
Jim is in fact wrong. In effect, all the football programs at AQ conferences, plus a couple of others, make money (and all the rest lose) — though there are hidden costs, mainly for facilities, being picked up. It’s the overall intercollegiate athletics programs that lose money in all but a few cases. That is, football is a huge loss center for hundreds of schools but break-even or better (sometimes much better)for 75 or so. Three 16-team conferences plus Notre Dame and BYU gives the 50, and they’ll do much better without the 20-25 programs that will be left behind this time.
I don’t foresee secession from the NCAA in basketball – just football.
August 19th, 2011 at 5:28AM
First of all, UD, could you please (pretty please) be a bit more careful with the headlines: “50 best universities” is a bit misleading. Most of the people reading your blog will think of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, CalTech and others – and not Texas Tech. So it gave me a bit of shock – even the institution I work is proud to be a top 50: So the headline did give me a shock.
Anyway, I think this is a positive development: Everything will be more honest from now on. At least the mingling of the finances between university and football team will end. So: let them go, and wish them luck.
There will not be any more hypocrisy about “student athletes”. Football players have short careers. So one model to help them would be financing their studies after they stop playing for the university (and could not break into NFL). Maybe there was some selection bias (econprof is rather mathematical), but I did not have any problems with “athletes”: One even wrote his undergraduate thesis with me, and he was very motivated..