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 27th, 2012 at 8:56AM
I don’t really understand your point here, UD. If one doesn’t like what was said at this meeting – or any other meeting – isn’t the answer to sponsor one of your own rather than piss and moan that it wasn’t banned?
June 27th, 2012 at 9:19AM
I think it’s more complicated than that, Alan. Pressure needs to be put on universities uninterested in thinking hard about events they should and should not sanction. Under pressure from student and faculty, British universities have begun to scrutinize with far more care the groups and ideas to which they lend their respectability. Universities are not compelled to sponsor any form of activity or speech; indeed, given their nature, universities are particularly compelled to be serious about ideas and behaviors worthy of sponsorship and those unworthy. The letter from Iranian-Canadian professors did not piss and moan; nor did it demand that Khomeini propaganda be banned. It protested the event, and gave perfectly good reasons why it was unworthy of association with a respectable university.
June 27th, 2012 at 9:37AM
The letter from Iranian-Canadian professors did not piss and moan; nor did it demand that Khomeini propaganda be banned.
The letter strongly implies that the university shouldn’t have allowed the event to go ahead. If that isn’t a retroactive call for a ban, then there’s a subtle semantic point here that is obviously being lost on me.
I concede that universities shouldn’t positively encourage every kind of speech. But the bar being set here is awfully low.
If I understand the details correctly, this meeting was arranged not by CU but by one of its student groups; the only active involvement the university undertook was to allow the use of its facilities and to advertise the event on its website – hardly ‘sponsorship’ in anything but the most token way.
And I see no evidence that anything said at this meeting was so extraordinarily provocative and/or irresponsible that the university should have intervened.
June 27th, 2012 at 9:56AM
I agree with you that this one is a judgment call. No one asked for the killing of homosexuals, or insisted that women shut up and sit in a different room, as has happened at British universities. As to sponsorship – this is a tricky business, it seems to me. When you advertise something on your university website and allow it to take place on campus you have, in my book, basically sponsored it. You have enabled the people having the event to use the reputation of the university to lend the event the sort of legitimacy universities lend things: To take place at a university means to have intellectual respectability, seriousness, etc. If it’s in fact a crude propaganda exercise, as this event seems to have been (it was a kind of Happy Birthday Khomeini event, apparently), you have allowed your university to be used. You’re supposed to protect the intellectual and moral integrity of your university.
June 27th, 2012 at 10:15AM
Don’t American politicians routinely use speaking gigs at colleges as crude propaganda exercises? Are we to prohibit them too? Or should there be a University Seriousness Committee pronouncing judgment on a case-by-case basis?
The proper response to speech you dislike is to talk back.
June 27th, 2012 at 10:34AM
All universities do have a version of a seriousness committee – their facilities and their names aren’t available to just anyone. They have a reputation to protect.
If reports of the Khomeini event are correct, it was absolutely without intellectual substance. It glorified a tyrant. I agree with the letter writers that it wasn’t an event worthy of a serious university, but you’re the only one talking about prohibitions and banning. We’re doing what you say we should do. We’re talking back.
June 27th, 2012 at 10:49AM
The letter writers are deliberately fudging the issue, as (with all due respect) I think you are too UD. Carleton had a choice when it was approached by its own student group. They could let the event go ahead, or they could ban it. I don’t see a third alternative here. So what should they have done? What would you have done?
You can’t have it both ways. If you’re not in favor of permitting something to take place, then you’re in favor of banning it. That’s an intellectually defensible position, even if it’s one I happen to disagree with. What’s not intellectually defensible is to condemn Carleton for allowing the event to take place, but then to fight shy of the implications of this demand.
June 27th, 2012 at 11:31AM
Oh, I think I’d have argued, if I’d been on the seriousness committee, against letting Iran film a birthday party for Khomeini on my campus. It’s embarrassing. I think as a result of various professors squawking about it, Carleton will scrutinize future such celebrations with greater care.
June 27th, 2012 at 12:24PM
So you’d have banned it? OK, fine. But let’s be honest about what you’re advocating here.