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
June 7th, 2012 at 7:21AM
Are you quoting Jolie Holland? If not, or even if, here she is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh77zevm6cY
June 7th, 2012 at 8:25AM
MattF: My source is earlier and a bit more enthusiastic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f68TdgErXkE
June 7th, 2012 at 7:33PM
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman. Total balderdash, of course.
June 7th, 2012 at 8:47PM
Why balderdash? Beautiful.
June 8th, 2012 at 7:40AM
Oh beautiful, sure. Memorized it when I was sixteen. Just narrow minded and anti-intellectual.
June 8th, 2012 at 8:32AM
Do you really think it’s narrow-minded and anti-intellectual?
June 8th, 2012 at 2:21PM
Yes. First, the Poet does not just prefer to enjoy nature as nature, he specifically rejects the scientific knowledge of nature. It makes him “tired and sick.” In fact, our mathematical understanding of the universe is elegantly beautiful and miraculous. Second, his narcissism vaults his “feelings” over any other kind of knowledge. This is solipsistic (“I wander’d off by myself…” rather than sit with others to share in the knowledge) and unreflective (“How soon, unaccountable….”).
June 8th, 2012 at 4:33PM
But couldn’t it be just a moment – a moment in a life of plenty of intellectual curiosity and seriousness, but nonetheless a moment – when the sheer mystery of the universe strikes a person? Whitman has plenty of praise for scientists – and other intellectuals – throughout his work. And as to not sitting with others — Whitman is the most social poet I can think of…