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
April 8th, 2012 at 5:18AM
Prince Charles! He’s my guy! I worked across the plaza from the brutalist Boston City Hall. Butt ugly, energy inefficient, nasty spaces. If people want to photograph these buildings for posterity, okay, but the wrecking ball can’t come too soon.
And I’m betting that, once enshrined on the intertubes for a grateful posterity, photo sites for most of these buildings will get maybe three visits a day.
April 8th, 2012 at 7:42AM
As I recall, the Art & Architecture students at Yale tried to burn down their Rudoph-designed building. Which turned into an inside joke in the architecture world, since you’d think that architecture students would know that concrete doesn’t burn.
April 8th, 2012 at 4:30PM
The reason the brutalist buildings are in trouble is not that they’re ugly (although they are, especially in grey damp climates – it’s no accident Rudolph’s best stuff is in Florida). The problem is that they’re unadaptable, to the point that it’s impossible to change the wiring, even to move a light switch. It was Corbu himself who called a house a machine for living; this is the test this style has failed.
April 9th, 2012 at 9:46AM
We have our own Brutalist building. Fortunately, it is slowly subsiding on one end, and it appears that nothing (affordable, anyway) can save it. The thought is that in 10-15 years, it will become structurally unsound and have to be demolished.
April 10th, 2012 at 4:23PM
A new building was erected in the 2000s at the École normale supérieure, to replace some smaller (and not too well-built) structure. The architect wanted bare concrete for artistic reasons, even though the building includes dormitories, and a library (unpainted concrete releases a powder that’s detrimental to books). I’ve had meetings in the lower floors, walking inside corridors gives a clear impression of playing a real-life DOOM game (you know, darkish corridors, neons, and expecting to have monsters behind the corner).
Later, I found a reduced scale replica of this building in an architecture museum: apparently, it was praised by other architects.
That’s one example of what I perceive as a disconnection between what many architects think of they should do, and what the rest of society would like them to. They think they should create original works of art; the rest of us, who have to live and/or work in their buildings, would like something convenient and pleasant.
April 10th, 2012 at 5:03PM
DM: Nice example of the problem. France has more than its share of depressing new – or newish – buildings.
April 11th, 2012 at 12:43AM
@Margaret Soltan: I think it’s related to 1) architecture being taught as an art, as opposed to a craft or an engineering discipline 2) arrogant dismissal of criticism as philistinism 3) designs for public buildings being chosen without input from the real stakeholders (that is, not the big brass who will go to the inauguration, but people who will work in them).
February 1st, 2015 at 10:44AM
[…] “It’s like saying, ‘I don’t like Pollock because he splattered paint,’” said Nina Rappaport, chairwoman of Docomomo-New York/Tri-State, an organization that promotes the preservation of Modernist architecture. “Does that mean we shouldn’t put it in a museum? No, it means we teach people about these things.” […]