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
November 7th, 2012 at 6:12PM
I only took one course like this in my life. The professor was one of the brightest in the school; having a Phd in History and a Masters in one of the hard sciences. If I recall both were from Harvard. He apparently decided to retire years ago but didn’t tell anyone. He showed up late, lectured badly from yellowed notes and graded tests by reading just the first answer you wrote. I mean that literally. I so disliked the course, I stopped reading the materials and taking notes in class so for the first exam there was only one question I knew the answer to. I put that answer first and literally made up answers to the rest of the questions to fill up the blue book. (I had heard that that was how he graded). I got a B+ in the exam. I couldn’t take it any more so I dropped the course. As far as I know, no one else did. Some, I suspect, wanted the easy B grade. Others may have been afraid to rock the boat.
November 7th, 2012 at 11:54PM
Why do students put up with this? It’s simple: very few of them are actually paying their own bill, and the ones who eventually will don’t really grasp the importance yet of getting something for their five- or six-digit expenditure.
November 8th, 2012 at 6:21AM
I think when it happens to you as a student for the first time, you’re honestly not sure at first that it is happening. I had only one experience like this as an undergraduate–it was a professor who was a very serious alcoholic. I had a chance to get to know him later outside the class and he was a very funny, warm, and thoughtful person when he wasn’t drunk (and even when he was only lightly drunk) and was actually good at running discussion and being a sensitive mentor to some students but it simply crippled his ability to stand up before a class and lecture clearly. I wasn’t sure at first why his lectures made no sense, or whether it was just a one-off bad lecture, but after four weeks, I was in fact pretty sure what the issue was and it was the only class I ever dropped while I was a student. But I was a more assured student than a lot of my peers–some of them really didn’t know what he was saying was incoherent or circular, or took a lot longer to realize that. Others might have reckoned that at least they’d do some good readings, learn a few things, and get a good grade (he was reputedly an easy grader).
November 8th, 2012 at 7:20AM
Tim: Yes. I too dropped a course in this way when I was an undergraduate — though in my utter innocence about things like alcoholism it took me a long time to do so.