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 21st, 2011 at 9:51AM
I think that Branch is absolutely right, in the quotation above. But the arguments for paying college athletes all turn out to be diversions from the real issues as well. After all, the value of a full athletic scholarship (for simplicity’s sake, let’s look at private institutions – Notre Dame, USC, Duke, BC etc. to avoid the state subsidy issue) is actually more than minor leaguers are ordinarily paid in any pro sport. The most valuable college athlete today is probably Andrew Luck at Stanford, and he chose to stay in college rather than go to the NFL this year. (Admittedly, his father is a well-paid AD.)
This is not to say that college athletes aren’t mistreated; the shift to year-to-year scholarships 45 years ago was the big step backward. But the point is that it’s not about the athletes, and it’s not about the money, it’s about the universities.
September 21st, 2011 at 10:25AM
did you catch the bizarre doublespeak tangential ‘defense’ of amateurism on PBS newshour the other night?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/sports/july-dec11/ncaa2_09-20.html
September 21st, 2011 at 1:18PM
I do not follow the causal inference issued in the final sentence of Branch’s comment. How is it the case that we cannot have an “honest debate” over the dominance of budget-sucking, resource-swallowing major athletics programs until we resolve the NCAA’s ludicrous and wholly disingenuous arguments about amateurism?
To be sure, the latter is of course an ethical issue invoking past legacies and present structures of colonialism, racism, and exploitation. But I fail to see how calling attention to these matters is a necessary prerequisite to addressing the larger question of how it is that major athletics programs can swallow so much of universities that basic missions like, you know, paying for teachers and not increasing fees on some of those least able to afford it (students) are utterly compromised?
Though these two phenomena are obviously connected in time, space, and history, I see no reason why we cannot address them both simultaneously. In my view, we should institute parallel efforts by which we both seek to expose, undermine, and reform the sham amateurism that drives colonial mentalities in major college sports, and at the same time initiate a larger conversation about the injustice of abandoning core missions to fund athletics programs.
September 21st, 2011 at 7:05PM
I would also argue that Mr. Branch’s “solution” to the problem of phony amateurism by paying athletes does little more than lead to a simplistic transfer of funds from students (who subsidize sports through athletic/student fees) and taxpayers (who subsidize these sports through tax preferenced donations) to a few athletes. It will also add fuel to the existing fire, by adding to the momentum for an even more centralized and powerful ESPNUniversity, as it drives the smaller, less competitive, smaller schools out of the market.
I have no doubt that the market value of the entertainment provided by some of these athletes far exceeds what they currently get in side payments and in-kind benefits. But, the appropriate order to solving the problems does not begin there. It ends there, after the tax preferences and hidden subsidies from the rest of the university are removed.
September 24th, 2011 at 7:50AM
UD:
Branch is being disingenuous at best. Does his article make at all clear the point he makes in his note to you, that sports do not generate an institutional profit but usually a deficit? I don’t think so. He claims he quotes presidents to that effect and, while I don’t doubt he may have heard privately from some about their concerns, unless I am mistaken (and I have gone back over the long article several times) those financial caveats are not in the article. What you find when you read the article are quotes like this, delivered prominently at the outset of the article and clearly intended to develop its tone: “Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of these television riches . . . ” and “(w)ith so many people paying for tickets and watching on television, college sports has become Very Big Business. According to various reports, the football teams at Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Penn State—to name just a few big-revenue football schools—each earn between $40 million and $80 million in profits a year, even after paying coaches multimillion-dollar salaries.” No, the financial effect on universities of big-time sports is just not on Branch’s rage radar screen. So we move on to the core of the argument, dealing mostly with the unfairness to the players. Branch only comes round to his player-centric view after couching it in institutional terms: “(f)or all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes.” But he does not then argue to re-institute amateurism but rather to give up the ghost, meaning to accept the essentially commercial nature of big-time sports, a move that in turn justifies his morality-based argument for paying the players. It is a good position to take and is argued with appropriate moral fervor. But how is it again that by ditching amateurism first, presumably as an act of moral cleansing, we get to a better place relative to *higher education*? Where will the new money come from? And even if the money is found without recourse to increases in tuition and pressure on academic budgets, what in God’s name would the resulting enterprise have to do with a college? It would be a junior NFL. That might be a good thing, necessary for the moral reasons Branch outlines. But it ain’t higher education