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 15th, 2012 at 7:50PM
Thank heavens we have people like you. People who have a career in higher education and should understand its values, yet you are advocating the shutdown of an entire university. English teachers, get a new job. Custodians, get a new job. Students, get a new school.
Most of chico’s students are from its service area (adjacent counties) the next closest state university is Sacramento state. 100 miles away. In the midst of millions of dollars in budget cuts where in the world do you get the idea we can put 13000 more students into our already over crowded CSU system?
Maybe you’re trying to be funny or tongue-in-cheek; but if you can tell me honestly that we should shut down a public university for isolated incidents of student binge drinking while most of the campus community is not partaking in such activities, I would have to say you’re just plain dumb..
November 15th, 2012 at 8:02PM
Willy: Today, Chico’s president shut down its entire Greek system. That’s step one. If his re-education plan works, great. Keep the students, re-open the fraternities and sororities. If it doesn’t, start over.
Re-read what I wrote, Willy. No one’s shutting down your school. The idea is to remove all of the current students and admit a completely new class of students to a new, non-Greek Chico.
These aren’t isolated incidents. Read the history of Chico. Rapes, hazing, deaths, riots. An appalling record, and this notorious reputation makes it appealing to drunks. Somehow that culture, that long ongoing sordid story, has to end.
As for where the students go: There’s always online education. If you can’t be on a campus without tearing it to shreds, you should stay home.
November 15th, 2012 at 8:24PM
Sounds worse than Groucho State.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29E6GbYdB1c
November 15th, 2012 at 8:39PM
HA! Never saw that one before, francofou. Thanks.
November 16th, 2012 at 3:52AM
It pains me to see UD advocating collective punishment, both in theory and at such a scale.
Seriously, there are more than fifteen thousand undergrads at Chico State, most of whom had nothing to do with the matters at hand, but throwing them all out is the corrective method you consider reasonable. Jesus Christ on a crutch.
You might want to remove FIRE from your blog-roll, as you clearly don’t share their values.
[Also, breach of contract doesn’t even cross your mind…]
This is the last time I’ll ever read your blog, b/c its now clear that you’re fit to be institutionalized.
November 16th, 2012 at 7:46AM
Mike S. – Is Zingg having closed all the fraternities and sororities also collective punishment?
November 16th, 2012 at 12:23PM
In your earlier posting about Chico (and it’s durable! When I went to college 43 years ago Chico already had its reputation) you said “recent Chico State presidents have tried, and tried hard. Faculty were almost totally uncooperative (“[F]aculty do not perceive it as their responsibility… to deal with this serious problem.”), despite the fact that, as the two presidents who wrote the article note, “they have tremendous influence on their students.” The presidents suggest shutting down the fraternities.”
So I’m kind of puzzled why you suggest that the students have to go, but don’t have a similar proposal for firing the faculty? There’s also justice to Willy Wildcat’s remark – Chico is sort of EOTKU for the rest of the state and there are a lot of decent kids from Redding and Mt Shasta for whom it’s the best nearby option.
My vote would be with shutting down the frats and announcing and enforcing serious penalties for public drinking, etc., to try and change the culture.
November 16th, 2012 at 12:42PM
dave.s.: You don’t fire the faculty; they are not the campus group causing its destruction. To be sure, they should take some of the blame for allowing the school’s deep culture of alcoholic violence and self-destruction to take root over so many decades. It would be great to get from the faculty senate a mea culpa, and a pledge to work harder once the new Chico State emerges.
The frats will re-open next semester. For awhile, the shock therapy of having shut them will improve their behavior. Then the synergy of a town that just wants to make money off of drunks, rampant advertising, and the same old traditions and shitheads, will again start producing dead twenty-year-olds.
November 16th, 2012 at 1:15PM
I sort of took your shut it down and send ’em all somewhere else idea as a little bit tongue-in-cheek. It’s not really possible; a school that tried to expel students who haven’t committed any infractions would soon cease to exist except as a source of revenue for the lawyers hired by student families. And those students exist, along with those who may be guilty of something but who were never caught.
You mention part of the problem; the town culture that makes money off student misbehavior and the alcohol over-consumption that leads to the misbehavior. That would still exist and the new students would probably become part of it before long. The larger culture of how to “do college” in the U.S. does not focus on academic work. MTV did not air a show called “MTV Study Hall,” but one called “MTV Spring Break.” The new students would come largely pre-primed to care more about their bacchanal than their baccalaureate — itself too often a mixture of classes that don’t teach much of anything anyone needs to know, such a how to communicate ideas, organize thoughts, reflect on life and the human condition and explore the natural world.
Even were the current student body of Chico State sent elsewhere en masse, the legacy they brought from the culture around them would haunt the campus: Classes don’t matter. Partyin’s fun. He or she is hot, Mom and Dad ain’t here and the dean can’t do a damn thing about it.