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
December 11th, 2011 at 7:58AM
I don’t think many people wake up in the morning and think ‘What evil can I do today? bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha’ Folks who started and now work in for-profits likely focus on the successes, the young mother who went from burger-flipper to phlebotomist. In junior high school when kids are saying they want to be astronauts and cops and senators, nobody says, ‘I want to be a debt collector threatening the young mother who went from burger-flipper to burger-flipper with a ten month detour during which she flunked out of phlebotomist school’ (and ran up ten thousand dollars of debt).
Nor do I think the young mother is worse off than Courtny Munna, the NY Times’ poster girl for student debt http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/29money.html?src=me&ref=general. The incentives here are dreadful. I think you fix them best by making student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, and making the schools eat what they cook – when the debts go bad, at least some of the loss goes against the school. This would discourage stupid and hopeless phlebotomist (and ‘interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies’).
Times quote: ‘“Had somebody called me and said, ‘Do you have a clue where this is all headed?’, it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed,” said Cathryn Munna. “When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying ‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’ ”
That’s not a role that the university wants to take on, though. “I think that would be completely inappropriate,” said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. “Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I’m not sure that’s always the best decision, but it’s one that they really have to make themselves.”’
Well, crap. Set it up so the schools have skin in the game, and they will stop facilitating stupid. Both profit and not-for-profit.
December 11th, 2011 at 8:10AM
dave.s. Yes, but your comment sets aside the crucial question of the legitimacy of the school. There’s plenty of evidence that – for excellent reasons – employers and graduate schools don’t respect for-profit degrees. For-profits accept virtually everyone who applies (or who they drag in); they pour their money into advertising and recruitment rather than education; quite a few of the schools are rules-violators. These fact are well-known; and, with more rules coming from the government, surely there will be yet more rule-breaking.
Yes, some students will have difficulty getting jobs when they graduate – from a legitimate or a barely legitimate school. But the legitimate school – the one that enjoys a good reputation – will tend to give its students an edge in life. It has taught them more; and it will be taken seriously by the world.
December 11th, 2011 at 8:28AM
“(for-profit schools) pour their money into advertising and recruitment rather than education”
I have to note that the expensive and unprofitable sports programs run by many non-profit schools, about which you frequently write, are actually a form of advertising and recruitment.
Substantial skin in the game for the institution should be required for federal loan programs, regardless of whether the school is for-profit or non-profit.
December 11th, 2011 at 2:37PM
The shame is that universities that used to unashamedly offer upward mobility (I’m thinking about City College of New York and Wayne State in Detroit and DePaul on a good day and Northern Illinois when headquarters thinks clearly) seem to be viewing the for-profit onlines as competitors to be emulated rather than as exemplars of What We Ought Not Do.
December 11th, 2011 at 8:05PM
The Times writes about the lobbyists’ full court press but neglects other salient facts. Senator Feinstein is married to UC Regent Dick Blum, he owns substantial shares in two for-profit higher ed. ventures. He’s got nearly a billion dollars invested in something regulated by the federal gov’t with the prospect of his wife voting on relevant legislation.
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2010-06-22/article/35661?headline=Billion-Dollar-Baby-br-The-University-of-California-invests-53-million-in-two-diploma-mills-owned-by-a-regent.
UD was mentioned here:
http://cloudminder.blogspot.com/
December 13th, 2011 at 12:47PM
[…] It’s strange to think of a world without the Bowl Championship Series. Not that it’ll happen. Stories like this one, in which its filthy corruption – even by the general standards of big-time university sports – is once again described, always conclude by saying, as this one does, “the end is near.” But the BCS sustains itself the same way other filthy American enterprises – for-profit colleges, for instance – sustain themselves, by using our tax dollars to lobby politicians. […]
December 13th, 2011 at 6:49PM
These guys talk about a lot of crap outcomes for people who went to serious schools, and quote apologist for those schools trying to pretend it away: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-07/trapped-by-50-000-degree-in-low-paying-job-is-increasing-lament.html