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 13th, 2011 at 9:41AM
I think maybe you underestimate the need for moral training. After all the Chinese philospher Mencius observed that “if men suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they will without exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress. They will feel so, not as a ground on which they may gain the favour of the child’s parents, nor as a ground on which they may seek the praise of their neighbours and friends, nor from a dislike to the reputation of having been unmoved by such a thing. From this case we may perceive that the feeling of commiseration is essential to man . . .”
But Mencius’ “seeing a child about to fall into a well” example clearly leaves out the case of “seeing a child get anally raped in a shower.” That this is wrong, and ought to be stopped, is evidently something people can’t figure out without help.
November 13th, 2011 at 10:50AM
these sham programs function as cover for administrators who can show that now employees are making “informed” choices for which they are solely responsible. The idea that anyone can learn to do anything complex/skill-related in these kinds of training seminars is one of the many charades in our times of limited training/mentoring, the idea that one can teach adults morality in such settings/circumstances is more absurd than thinking that one can teach “critical” thinking and or ethics/empathy to undergrads in book based lecture classes.
November 13th, 2011 at 11:36AM
I’m just… astonished that anyone with a brain (y’know, that gelatinous organ inside the skull) can claim that the Catholic bishops who tolerated sexual abuse of children did it because they lacked ethics ‘training’. This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve seen this week, at least. But then again, I haven’t been watching the Republican ‘debates’. So, who knows.
November 13th, 2011 at 11:41AM
The push for ethics training is only slightly dumber than another common reaction by the chattering class, which is to call for a new Congressional investigation. Two cheers for Representative Bachmann, who, this morning, told David Gregory that Congress had enough work already (never mind that Congress investigating College Football brings to mind peacocks investigating elks for excessive preening.)
November 13th, 2011 at 12:04PM
In the latest issue of Scientific American/Mind, there’s a retrospective look at the Milgram experiments, in which subjects were “required” to give other subjects electrical shocks which they believed to be of painful and even potentially dangerous levels. Interesting in this context…an awful lot of people went along, and the only “closed authoritarian world” that was involved was an authority figure in the form of a scientist in a lab coat.
Interestingly, people went along more when the requirement was stated as a strong request than when it was stated as a direct order.
November 13th, 2011 at 1:52PM
I doubt that this type of mandatory training has much of an effect.
However, I would say that the 25 Penn State students in my class and I have had outstanding and compelling discussions of the meaning of these issues in our meetings this week.
Imagine that, faculty and students seeking answers and understanding together.
November 14th, 2011 at 9:11AM
gtwma, understanding “meaning” does not translate into know-how and or will-power/courage. I’m sure if you quizzed the people involved in perpetrating this horror about these happenings in the abstract they could give you the right answers for what someone in their circumstances should have done.