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
July 13th, 2012 at 1:16PM
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/jul/13/lessons-penn-state/
July 13th, 2012 at 5:13PM
I have no idea what to make of your final paragraph there, UD (it scans like you’ve dipped into Aaron Sorkin’s pharmacopeia), but on the relationship between football and academic excellence you are just wrong. I refer you to the comments I gave some time ago:
I think I have a better metric for this “first-rate academics” evaluation. Economics is the dismal science, they say. I don’t know if I would characterize what they do science but they do appear to appreciate numbers and measurement. Here are some relevant ones from the 2010 National Research Council rankings of doctoral programs.
Let’s make it a head-to-head comparison, pitting a football mad public SEC school, say The University of Alabama, against an East Coast private liberal arts bastion, George Washington University. The NRC rankings are multidimensional, with rankings based on survey results and regression analysis (find methodology info at http://www.nap.edu), and has critics, but they are highly regarded.
Consider programs in Chemistry. There are a number of ways to slice the data but here’s the upshot:
Program Median Rank UA 67/178 GWU 98/178
I thought this might be unfair because I didn’t think GWU had an engineering program, which might put them at a disadvantage overall for STEM programs. Turns out they do (in fact, it’s the School of Engineering and Applied Science) it’s just that I had never heard of it, or anyone from there. Indeed, UA should be at a disadvantage, because GWU has a well-regarded medical school, while the medical school of the UA system is associated with UAB (Birmingham) and not UA.
But why pussyfoot around? Let’s go right to the heart of academic power, the departments of English Language and Literature:
Program Median Rank UA 78/119 GWU 107/119
[and oof, look at the quality ranking distribution for GWU http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/english/compare-programs?p1=7006&p2=6969. Monodisperse at bad]
So, whatever those GWU folks are doing on Saturdays in the fall when they are pointedly NOT watching their football team (they don’t have one, dontcha know) it ain’t improving the quality of their academic programs. Where does all the money go?
July 13th, 2012 at 6:20PM
Shane: As I said in the post, scattered departments (good departments) would undoubtedly survive if they pulled football out from under football-heavy schools like yours. There are serious and impressive departments at almost all football schools (most notably at the University of Texas).
What seems to me truest to say is that while the absence of football has little to do with academic excellence, the presence of football, on many campuses, compromises academic excellence and moral integrity in all sorts of ways — ways that I’ve tried to chronicle in detail through the years of this blog.
July 13th, 2012 at 6:38PM
But, seriously, why should football be a variable in the academic-rating-analysis anyhow? Much less a critical element in university life. It’s a huge WTF, even without the various forms of criminality.
July 13th, 2012 at 6:49PM
MattF: Yes. The basic thing is one wonders what the fuck football – at least megaton tv football – is doing on university campuses.
July 13th, 2012 at 8:23PM
“So, whatever those GWU folks are doing on Saturdays in the fall when they are pointedly NOT watching their football team (they don’t have one, dontcha know) it ain’t improving the quality of their academic programs. Where does all the money go?”
Yeah, I note how the top-10 universities in the country include any number of football powerhouses.
July 13th, 2012 at 9:07PM
Here’s a recent list of top ten schools.
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
I see no football powerhouses, though I could be wrong. Duke comes closest, I guess, but their team hasn’t been up to much for a long time.
July 13th, 2012 at 9:40PM
Right, there’s no history of football at Harvard and Yale. John Elway did not go to Stanford.
Big time college football is a kind of historic accident. It may seem incongruous, but it is not necessarily corrosive to the missions of higher education. I still wonder at the mindset that sees Theater and Dance as legitimate Arts in the academic sense, but doesn’t see the beauty and physical excellence in football, or basketball. What would the Victorians make of this one-sided view of education? All mind, no body, and very little spirit.
July 14th, 2012 at 8:40AM
Right, there’s no history of football at Harvard and Yale. John Elway did not go to Stanford.
And if you’d like to deal with our actual point, you’re welcome to.
July 15th, 2012 at 4:33PM
Pardon, “Total”, I didn’t realize you were the one calling the tune here.
(Total. Total? What a strangely grandiose handle to hide behind. Unless, of course, you are in fact a cereal).
What point do you think you were making? The conversation seem to indicate that academic excellence and big time football we’re not mutually exclusive, but that the presence of big money athletics is problematic on campus.
Then you chime in with a list and say the best colleges do not play football. I say your list is biased to private schools who tend to no longer have important athletic programs (though many once did). It is also too short to take in the breadth of quality in higher ed in the US. Here’s a better list of top 25 research universities http://mup.asu.edu/research2010.pdf (pg18). Every one of the public institutions save one plays Div 1 college football, as do at least two of the private schools (USC and Vanderbilt).