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 22nd, 2012 at 11:01AM
The reviews are scathing. I wasn’t expecting that as the author’s other work has been pretty good. Maybe they should have used the year instead of rushing the book to print.
August 22nd, 2012 at 4:52PM
Football coaches work on term contracts, but would an older coach have a possible age-discrimination claim if he were not renewed only or primarily because of age?
August 24th, 2012 at 3:26PM
Theprofessor–it would be a big surprise if Spanier hadn’t run his decision past in-house counsel, at the very least, to determine potential legal exposure in the event Paterno were canned. For a big-ticket discharge with potential big-money stakes, maybe outside special counsel and a PR advisor.
Whether we like it or not, America’s big institutions will sometimes regard civil and criminal penalties as a mere cost of business. (Last I heard, e. g., the only criminal charge in connection with the big BP oil spill a while back was lodged against a mid-level engineer.)
August 25th, 2012 at 11:16AM
Personnel decisions, lawsuits, etc. A new university president blasted into town a while back with his own administrative team. An established senior administrator, who’d been favorably evaluated by the new president, felt slighted when the new team’s pay was set at about 70% more than hers. After a duke-out with the president, she was kicked to a support department, then left the university.
Then she filed suit. The settlement was for 2/3 of a mill. The university retained outside special counsel to defend itself.
The replacement administrator, by the way, was hired at about the salary desired by the complainant. Plus, to guard against the new administrator going off the reservation, the president installed a second, nominally assistant administrator who, I’m told, was permitted to report independently to the president. My rough guess is that the unwillingness of the president to respond to that pay equity complaint cost the university maybe $1.5 million over the last decade, and God knows what-all in administrative discord.
I’m not even sure where you’d start calculating the economic consequences of failing to clean house at Penn State.