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 20th, 2012 at 6:37AM
Yet again, something so absurd (yet true) that it really should be something from The Onion.
August 20th, 2012 at 10:03AM
I suspect the poor man got confused when studying the thought of revered feminist professor Mary Daly about parthenogenesis.
August 20th, 2012 at 10:08AM
Akin’s comments do reveal an interesting tension at the heart of the pro-life argument, however. After all, if you do literally believe that personhood begins at conception – that a fetus has exactly the same moral and legal standing as a postpartum child – then there shouldn’t be any circumstances in which abortion is allowable, no matter how ‘hard’ or horrible. Akin is a dickwad, but at least there is a certain amount of logical consistency to what he’s claiming. It’s the folks who espouse fetal personhood but throw in a rape-and-incest exception who are espousing the most patent nonsense.
August 20th, 2012 at 12:22PM
Alan: You’re right.
August 20th, 2012 at 12:22PM
tp: Yes, I’m sure Akin’s well-read in feminism.
August 20th, 2012 at 3:34PM
Thanks for the Heggie link. Most illuminating. The reasoning does make a certain amount of sense — but only if you think of women’s genitalia as men’s turned inside out, and ignore a century or so’s understanding of women’s hormonal cycles (I wonder how theories that assumed the ejaculation of a female seed on orgasm dealt with the cyclical nature of women’s fertility, which I suspect has been recognized for some time, if only due to analogies in the animal kingdom, and the rather obvious fact of menstruation, and its connection to pregnancy).
And yes, if fertilized eggs are full human beings, then abortion is murder no matter how the pregnancy occurred. One then needs to figure out what the fact that, in the normal course of things, 30%+ of those human beings never implant and grow means. Or how to think about pregnancies where the fertilized egg divides further but does not differentiate, resulting in something more like a cancer than a baby (I’ve forgotten the technical term, but this exists). Or what to do about ectopic pregnancies (which is probably getting back into similar territory as pregnancies due to rape or incest).
These issues do not lend themselves to easy answers — which just might be an argument for letting individual women make their own decisions about their own situations with whatever help they deem necessary from medical professionals, other scientists, and/or clergy/theologians.