Lively radio interview with a News and Observer reporter about the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud (scroll down).
As with Thomas Petee at Auburn and Leo Wilton at SUNY Binghamton, it’s crucial to have either the chair of a department (like Chapel Hill’s Julius Nyang’oro, about whom the reporter is talking up there in my headline) or a very high-ranking faculty member running the independent studies that athletes find so attractive.
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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
August 15th, 2012 at 2:33PM
I wonder how many nervous administrators across the country are chewing on their fingernails, knowing (or not knowing) what is going on in their own universities.
August 15th, 2012 at 2:35PM
francofou: Surely they know. It’s strange for me to read the language of not knowing from everyone. The eligibility tricks are overt and systemic.
August 15th, 2012 at 5:45PM
My experience is that administrators know and care little about what happens on the street, so to speak. For the most part, they live in a parallel world, removed from contact with what goes on.
Your own blog documents countless cases of shady dealings carried on in the wings.
They tend to be nice, earnest people, but clueless as to what people actually do, are so burdened with needless tasks that they don’t have time to look, or are so hypnotized by their own rhetoric (“This is a great university”) that they are impervious to contrary evidence.
They should know, but they don’t (some do, of course).
August 16th, 2012 at 8:59AM
Many of them really don’t know. They don’t want to know. They have flunkies assigned to make sure that they don’t know. Not only is the office cooler filled with institutional Kool-Aid, there are plates of Plausible Deniability Cookies on every desk.
August 16th, 2012 at 12:46PM
Exactly, Professor theprofessor. A lot of middle-level folks building profiles so that they can move up or out.
I’ve tried to communicate some semblance of reality to administrators (classes consistently not met, intimidation of students, violation of policy, open incompetence, harassment, etc.). It didn’t sit well, and only rarely were there consequences.