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 14th, 2012 at 7:42AM
The Penn State system took over the formerly free-standing medical school in Hershey, but it’s a long way from Happy Valley. PSU isn’t the same kind of of full-scale university as other Big 10 schools – it’s a bigger UMass, really.
July 14th, 2012 at 8:57AM
I took the irony to be that at a school with a highly ranked program in higher education administration, its own administration was such a thorough failure. Clearly, Spanier, Schultz, Curley, et al., were not taking those classes; let’s hope they weren’t teaching them, either.
July 14th, 2012 at 6:43PM
….looking for the ultimate in irony….look no further….From Spanier’s remarks to the BOT in 2009
“Ed and Helen Hintz share this belief, and last month they made a generous $5 million gift to establish the Presidential Leadership Academy, one of the “big ideas” developed for our capital campaign. This leadership development program will take a preeminent role in helping students develop the critical thinking skills necessary to lead in a changing, challenging world.
We need to prepare our students to live in a world that doesn’t operate like a cable news show, where people sit on opposite sides of a table and yell at each other with extreme positions. The truth of the matter is that in this world few things are black and white. It is in the gray areas where people must come to terms with the decisions in the workplace, in their family life, in their community, and across borders.
The Presidential Leadership Academy will help us train our future leaders to reach out and understand diverse viewpoints. I will have the great pleasure and privilege of teaching the lead seminar to each new class of 30 students. One of the things I’ll teach them is the importance of reaching out not only to the captains of industry or the leaders of the nation – but to the mail carrier, food service workers, the night shift custodian, and especially the Blackberry support person!(…no mention fo kids.) Every encounter has the potential to influence your life.
I am very grateful to Ed and Helen for their extraordinary generosity because I believe this initiative is at the core of the most important work we do at Penn State. ”
http://live.psu.edu/story/38411
July 14th, 2012 at 6:44PM
BTW, Penn State would be in a better place today if he had, in fact, reached out to the night shift custodian in the Lasch Building.
July 15th, 2012 at 2:44AM
Not to defend Graham Spanier, Joe Paterno, or any other individual–but the US News rankings are a joke. Penn State is ranked “ninth among public schools and 17th overall” in federal research funding (http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/pitt-ascends-to-third-in-federal-research-funds-632661/#ixzz20fu0ziuq), and as Michael Berube, the very distinguished English professor at Penn State and current president of the MLA has noted, it has excellent departments in a number of liberal arts fields.
July 16th, 2012 at 6:04PM
..”The sad irony of these rankings is unbearable.”…
Um, PSU chemistry is ranked 3rd among public U’s. This according to the NRC:
http://www.chem.psu.edu/news-events/news/2010/10/penn-state-chemistry-ranked-in-top-ten
July 16th, 2012 at 6:54PM
THe NRC “rankings” did not assign a specific numerial rank rather it gave a band of possible ranks. The purpose this was to avoid the sort of chest thumping to which you link. to complicate matters further there were two sets of “rankings”. The regression based ranking which is referred to at the link has the band for Penn State a 6-24. The two state schools ahead of it Berkely and UIUC had bands of 1-3 and 3-8, respectively.
http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/chemistry/rank/_M______________________________________________________________U
The survey ranking gives a band for Penn State of 10-38 with five state schools ranked ahead of it.
graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/chemistry/rank/__M_____________________________________________________________U
There is too much ambiguity in these rankings for them to be meaningful.
July 17th, 2012 at 11:09AM
@Veblen, Oh, I think there’s enough there to indicate that PSU is not the vast academic wasteland that Fineman opines. Chemistry is not the only PSU program with decent NRC rankings. A lot of us PSU alums didn’t go there for the football, but for the academic reasons. It’s on top of the heap of public NE U’s in most areas of grad studies in science and engineering.
I started out as a football skeptic as a 1st year TA in 1982. I got to know a few football players in chemistry rec sessions, surprisingly they were the solid citizen types. I googled one and see he’s an orthopedic surgeon after earning an ME degree at PSU. I sure he’s aghast at the recent events.