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 13th, 2012 at 5:27PM
don’t get your hopes up,
the economists don’t have the greatest track record on recent predictions.
February 14th, 2012 at 6:11AM
Not a major point, but it’s curious that an article coauthored by an econ prof from the University of Oklahoma would trash Alabama’s academics.
US News rankings, national universities:
Alabama 75
Oklahoma 101
Actually, at 75, Bama ranks even with, among others, Indiana and Baylor. Say what you want about its football obsession, but it’s actually a pretty decent university if US News is to be believed.
(The other coauthor teaches at George Mason, which, at #138, ranks below both Alabama and LSU.)
And the idea that lawsuits will bring down football is laughable. Congress will pass targeted tort reform before they’ll let that happen. Besides, I’ve spent my whole life being told by various experts that government will outlaw boxing any day now. I’m still waiting.
February 14th, 2012 at 9:15AM
I think I have a better metric for this “first-rate academics” evaluation. Economics is the dismal science, they say. I don’t know if I would characterize what they do science but they do appear to appreciate numbers and measurement. Here are some relevant ones from the 2010 National Research Council rankings of doctoral programs.
Let’s make it a head-to-head comparison, pitting a football mad public SEC school, say The University of Alabama, against an East Coast private liberal arts bastion, George Washington University. The NRC rankings are multidimensional, with rankings based on survey results and regression analysis (find methodology info at http://www.nap.edu), and has critics, but they are highly regarded.
Consider programs in Chemistry. There are a number of ways to slice the date but here’s the upshot:
Program Median Rank UA 67/178 GWU 98/178
I thought this might be unfair because I didn’t think GWU had an engineering program, which might put them at a disadvantage overall for STEM programs. Turns out they do (in fact, it’s the School of Engineering and Applied Science) it’s just that I had never heard of it, or anyone from there. Indeed, UA should be at a disadvantage, because GWU has a well-regarded medical school, while the medical school of the UA system is associated with UAB (Birmingham) and not UA.
But why pussyfoot around? Let’s go right to the heart of academic power, the departments of English Language and Literature:
Program Median Rank UA 78/119 GWU 107/119
[and oof, look at the quality ranking distribution for GWU http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/english/compare-programs?p1=7006&p2=6969. Monodisperse at bad]
So, whatever those GWU folks are doing on Saturdays in the fall when they are pointedly NOT watching their football team (they don’t have one, dontcha know) it ain’t improving the quality of their academic programs. Where does all the money go?