… if you need a little pick-me-up about university football, complete with excited invocations of ‘shirtless boys,’ read this. Its title is It All Begins With Football, and ain’t it the truth. This one little essay will put all your angst right in the shade and get you pissing your pants all over again for the team.
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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 13th, 2012 at 8:49AM
Fenster commented at Dr. Mead’s website at the time this was posted late last year. Those comments follow. And for the record, I was not blowing smoke at Mead . . . I read his blog almost every day and am a great admirer of his clearheaded (usually) view of the world. Not this time.
——————-
I am a big admirer and regular reader of this column. But this article has me worried that you might be blowing smoke more than I thought, since you clearly seem to be blowing it here. You make awfully grand statements, backed up by not a shred of evidence. It’s an oddly ideological statement from one I usually think of as hard-headed.
Of course it is true that historically athletics have formed an integral part of the special bond colleges make with students, alumni an donors. But that’s just a fact that needs to be put into context, and everything is relative. Is athletics in fact as key a bonding agent as you assume? Does it lead as directly to big donations and appropriations as you assert? “Athletics has been important” is a true statement, but is it true enough to float your grand conclusions? Hmmm . . . I doubt it. The fundraisers I’ve known recognize the appeal of athletics but whether their appeal causes enough dough to come across the transom to cover costs and produce a net benefit to the institution is another matter altogether.
And therein lies the problem. All well and good to make a generalized historical assertion that sports rivalries have had their upsides. But at the moment universities are faced with very specific financial problems related to athletics–in essence the cost base of a mini-NFL grafted onto an academic program. Most university CFOs will tell you that, while some big athletics programs make money, most are a sucker’s bet. So fundraising programs chase that big $2 million donation for a $10 million field house, finding themselves unable to say no to the gift and having to shovel the difference in out of tuition.
It just sounds to me like you are all misty eyed and romantic about a phenomenon that calls for your usual rigor.
June 13th, 2012 at 8:52AM
Now that I think of it, Fenster also wrote a somewhat longer rejoinder on his own blog, here:
http://fensterreturns.blogspot.com/2011/12/more-sports.html
June 13th, 2012 at 9:04AM
fenster: Thank you for that comment and for the link to your longer response. I think you’re right that Mead is simply getting all girly here. Cannot think straight on the subject. Love is a many splendor’d thing.