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 15th, 2012 at 11:05AM
Good that they’re paying for salaries, travel, utilities, etc; still, as a veteran of many cost-accounting wars I bet I could have some fun with these numbers. For example, are they paying for legal costs–both internal and outside law firms–when players get into trouble or former coaches file lawsuits? Are they paying for the capital costs of the buildings themselves as well as the heating/cooling thereof? etc
Many companies do an extremely mediocre job of understanding their costs, and I’d bet it’s even worse for universities, since the spectre of financial disaster is generally a little further away…
February 15th, 2012 at 12:14PM
david: Absolutely. The article seemed to me an excellent description of an excellent song and dance number put on for the faculty.
February 15th, 2012 at 1:19PM
At a place like Clemson, where football and basketball presumably bring in substantial revenues, the situation is very different from that at, say, Akron. The real problem isn’t so much money as diversion of attention and the subordination of academic standards and concerns.
On the money side, though, personnel and student aid loom extraordinarily large in university budgets. In my (admittedly limited) experience, capital costs tend to be much less of a factor than they seem, because they’re big numbers but spread over many years. (They may cause acute short-term issues if mishandled, as apparently occurred at Berkeley.)
In my view, an undue focus on costs has been the enemy of meaningful reform of intercollegiate athletics. Yes, it gets the faculty all riled up; but it doesn’t point the way to the kinds of changes we need to see.
February 15th, 2012 at 3:44PM
It was all lies at Cal. When UC got caught clandestinely funneling $10 million/year into the athletic department they claimed it was legit by invoking a new definition of an auxiliary. Eventually the accounting at Clemson, will be revealed for what it is – smoke, mirrors and nothing more.
Universities don’t need football to fulfill the educational and research missions of the institutions. Too bad much of America refuses to understand simple concepts such as this one.