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
November 10th, 2011 at 9:17AM
My wife is a primatologist. The only thing that made it at all possible for me to continue to work for 40 years as a professor was the parallels she consistently drew between human behavior in academe and the behavior of chimpanzees and other non-human primates in their societies. (Homo academicus as baboon! It reminds me of a certain limerick about a certain Chomondely Colquhoun.)
In a word, our species (like most animal species) really is nuts, irredeemably nuts, despite our best efforts to prove otherwise.
It is the Perrys and Cains, the Paternos and Hausers of the world, and those who applaud and enable them, who are the normal ones, by any statistical measure. Aristotle was wrong: humans cannot be defined as “rational animals.” At best, we are rationalizing animals.
It is the relatively few people who just don’t “get it,” who find it repellent to go along with the program, who cannot follow the dominant paradigm, who are the statistically abnormal members of our species. At least, that’s how it looks to me after 40 years in Academe.
So here’s to our abnormality! We, too, have a role to play, though is is an outsider’s role. We will still advocate for truth, for honesty, for beauty, and for other things like them. If we do nothing else in our lives, that at least is well worth doing. At the end of our days, it is well worth having done.
November 10th, 2011 at 9:21AM
Perhaps, without the ideological spouting, there is an illustration of the utilitarian fallacy: is the greater good (assuming for the sake of discussion that such exist) served by a few little boys sacrificing in order that generations of PSU students get their Saturday traditions?
When it comes to Big Time Sports, the reader with long memory will recall that Donna Shalala was very much part of Bill Clinton’s court intellectual feminist team as well as paymaster for big time football at Syracuse and Wisconsin at the same time that she was wrecking academic programs in the name of Diversity.
Pederasty State’s final regular season game will be at Wisconsin, and I expect Badger Nation to be suitably demonstrative that Saturday. You don’t give those kids, whackaloon fans or otherwise, this kind of material.
November 10th, 2011 at 9:47AM
Big ol’ Cognitive Dissonance Express train coming down the tracks. The normal response is to seek comfort and support from the group that holds the belief being challenged, the weirdo response is to think ‘Maybe we’ve all been wrong.’
November 10th, 2011 at 12:25PM
No, MattF. This is college. University. Any other location, maybe. But if Penn State is anything other than a fraud and a joke, if it’s an actual university, it is the one place in the country where all of those sports attitudes – loyalty above all, evasion of important matters, winning as the only goal – are the opposite of what the institution stands for. At universities, all that stuff is weird. Fearless, independent thought, serious consideration of serious things, moral autonomy – that’s what universities are about, isn’t it? That’s why universities are weird places to normal people, why politicians on the right think they’ve scored major points merely by saying out loud that Obama used to be a college professor. People at universities are supposed to be the first to say Maybe we’ve all been wrong.
November 10th, 2011 at 1:22PM
I’d say Penn State is, right now, an arena where an unambiguous line can be drawn– And, OK, in one corner we have ‘normal’, and in the other, ‘not normal’…
I don’t think, by the way, that winning is the only goal for sports fans, group identification and cohesiveness are the real deal, and are the things that those unhappy Penn State students don’t want to give up.
November 10th, 2011 at 3:14PM
How much does this episode really have to do with football? It’s a lot more like what’s happened to the Catholic Church than like what we hear about in (say) Coral Gables. The organization didn’t crack down hard on a transgressor because he had been a faithful servant (otherwise) and because the publicity would be bad. Obviously the specifics of the case, including the dollars and publicity involved, are conditioned by the aura surrounding Penn State football, but the same kind of cover-up could happen almost anywhere, inside and outside the university.