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
February 7th, 2012 at 3:26PM
Perhaps. There are so many confounders and situational factors involved that I don’t think your notions are largely generalizable.
The degree to which someone is impulsive plays a part. In the cases you mentioned, it is possible that they chose the spaces they did in order to minimize/avoid harm to others. If one lives in a dorm with paper-thin walls or a lack of firewalls, then the person planning the suicide may well think to avoid using communal living/social spaces and instead choose less populated ones, even though the visibility is higher.
The perception of thwarted belongingness is overwhelming – and it has occurred for highly and chronically distressed people in the immediate physical presence of others. Ergo, there may well be no notion that their actions will be perceived by others as having salience – because they have not perceived themselves to have salience.
Thomas Joiner’s research found that the majority of people making suicide attempts were not doing so as a result of exacting revenge or exhibiting a display of anger so much as they were attempting to quickly and permanently end unbearable psychache.
Given that, I’d guess that there are also outliers and exceptions, and that the examples you offer may be just those.
February 7th, 2012 at 7:30PM
UD, you might be interested in this study which among other things analyzes the use of words in poems and finds some differences between suicides and non-suicides.
http://hbr.org/2011/12/your-use-of-pronouns-reveals-your-personality/ar/1?cm_sp=most_widget-_-hbr_articles-_-Your%20Use%20of%20Pronouns%20Reveals%20Your%20Personality
February 7th, 2012 at 8:03PM
desperation is hard to pin down