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
September 12th, 2011 at 7:09AM
$40K annual tuition and seniors in upper-level classes with enrollments of 100?!
September 12th, 2011 at 8:53AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/at-colleges-the-marketers-are-everywhere.html?_r=1&ref=education
September 12th, 2011 at 10:49AM
Trustees at Brown serve for a fixed term — a very small number of years, I think — and then step down. The terms are staggered. If any particular person is no longer in the published list of Corporation members, it generally means only that his term is over.
The Board of Trustees fills all its own vacancies, if I remember correctly, and does so entirely as it sees fit. The head of the Board of Trustees is the Chancellor of Brown, not the President of Brown. The purview of the Trustees is the financial and business side of running the University
If ever push should come to shove, the Chancellor outranks the President as chief officer over the whole Corporation. In principle, the Chancellor can fire the President, and ask for formal Corporation support afterwards. (Of course, he will be careful to have informal support before he does this.) This has happened once since I came to Brown in 1967, and only a few times in the whole history of Brown.
Here, I think, we have the reason why the President is the chief public spokesperson for Brown, not the Chancellor. The President is disposable if anything goes seriously wrong in public and the Corporation needs a scapegoat. (I should probably explain the Corporation: it is simply both Boards considered together. The Corporation owns Brown in much the same sense as any individual person owns a piece of land, a house and its furniture, or a few dogs.)
There is also the Board of Fellows, and the President is the head of that Board. The terms of the Fellows, again if I remember correctly, are longer than the terms of the Trustees, but still they are fixed. Their purview is the academic side of running the University. There are fewer Fellows than Trustee.
Both Boards meet together in the same room. Both presiding officers sit at the table before them, each of whom presides only over his own board. It is said to work very smoothly.
Any powers that the Faculty may have at any given time are by gracious permission of the Corporation. In principle any or all of them may be revoked at any time without explanation. Indeed, the colonial-era Charter founding the University does not even acknowledge that the University might have a Faculty (other than the Board of Fellows). Tthe President (together with the Board of Fellows) are the Faculty, according to the Charter. They are supposed by the Charter to teach all classes and grade all students, and we faculty are merely his hired assistants in the business of teaching, much as other administrators are hired to keep dining services or plant operations running. Even now, the President and the Fellows officially assign grades to students, and our efforts to grade students and their work are merely advisory.
When I came to Brown, the document called Faculty Rules and Regulations had an appendix saying (roughly) that the University accepted and approved the recommendations and principles of the AAUP regarding promotion and tenure, but reserved the unlimited right to set them aside in any or all cases as it thought good, without notice or explanation. That appendix wasn’t there any longer the last time I looked, about 15 years ago. (It did always seem to me something like waving the proverbial red flag before a bull.)
September 12th, 2011 at 3:46PM
Markets find a way, protestations that they don’t belong notwithstanding.
September 12th, 2011 at 5:26PM
Serrano should have his degree revoked. Of course economics applies here: people are paying $40000 a year to be in a situation where the management pretends that economics does not apply. That’s the service which is being paid for.