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
December 15th, 2012 at 7:37AM
Argumentum ad hominem?
December 15th, 2012 at 8:46AM
There’s nothing so frustrating as listening to Americans debate the Second Amendment to their Constitution, particularly in the aftermath of some horrible shooting. The loudest voices are invariably the most thoughtless. And anyone who even attempts to bring some nuance to the conversation will barely be heard over the din.
On the one side, you have people who somehow interpret “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” as nothing more than a statement chartering the National Guard. On the other, you have those who insist that the only amendment that actually uses the phrase “well-regulated” is not even subject to the sort of limits that we routinely place on all of our other constitutional rights. I mean, seriously, just try to square the plain language of the Fourth Amendment with the experience of negotiating the modern U.S. airport.
In the quiet middle are those of us who think, “Come on, this shouldn’t be so hard. Of course, you’re entitled to weapons to protect your home and property. Of course, nobody needs multiple assault rifles and hundred-round magazines to accomplish that goal.” (And it always amazes me how we pretend to take seriously those loonies who believe that Second Amendment is all about overthrowing the government, if need be. First, no it isn’t. And second, as someone once said, ask David Koresh how well that works out.)
We negotiate compromises on every other constitutional right. Free speech?: not if you want to yell “fire” at the megaplex. Search and seizure?: not if you want to evade a drunk driving check point. Cruel and unusual punishment?: not if you kill someone in Texas. People debate these restrictions, of course, but somehow they manage to do so without reference to cold, dead fingers.
Unfortunately, even this unfathomable tragedy won’t change America’s stupidest conversation. There will always be those who see every firearm as a murder machine and every armed citizen as a gun nut. There will also be those whose unfulfilled sense of manhood, or fear of the other, or both, compels them to rage against the totalitarian apocalypse every time a politician says something sensible about the need to rein in the country’s private arsenals. And, this being the United States, you also have those who profit from the arms race spreading fear and renting politicians.
And somewhere right now in America, some twisted individual is eyeing his parents’ weapons stash and planning the next atrocity.
December 15th, 2012 at 9:02AM
TAFKAU: Thank you for that comment. Your last thing, about “some twisted individual,” reminds me that I’ve thought a lot, in the last few hours, about how remarkably “profilable” these guys are. Always guys, of course. Always. And almost always very young – teens to late twenties. And almost always flagrantly nuts for years, or at least for months.
Read the background articles on the latest demented rifleman and weep.
His mother, despite his obviously very dangerous madness, decides to keep him home and help him herself. What a horrendous decision. Where were the doctors or other family members who might have had him committed? No father was in the house (divorce); his only sibling says he has long been estranged from his brother. No shit. I wonder when the father last saw him.
I’d take issue only with one thing you wrote in that last paragraph – “his parents’ weapons stash.” From Columbine on down, they don’t need to look to the old folks. It’s easy in this country for lunatics – even barely out of diapers lunatics – to amass military-grade arsenals all their own.
**********************
Hold on.
So here are our possibilities. We can believe that this woman, called a pillar of her safe affluent community by many who have been interviewed, purchased for herself a Glock, a Sig Sauer, and a Bushmaster rifle. Just a little something in case someone threatening comes to the door.
Or we can accept the obvious sickening truth. Just as this woman, from “twisted” (to use your word) love, kept this person in the house and in the community, so she bought weapons for him.
*******************************
Update: My bad. See this post.
December 15th, 2012 at 10:44AM
What’s most depressing is that we know already how this will play out over the next week. The media, eager to service the Americans taste for ghoulish sentimentality, will saturate us with images of dead children. The ‘search for answers’ will begin. Some pious douchebag will blame it all on The Gays (that role is traditionally taken by Pat Robertson, but Huckabee seems to have beaten him to the punch this time). A few politicians will mumble something vaguely about Measures Needed To Be Taken. Then the NRA will reemerge and terrify them all back into their senses. People will start talking about The Hobbit and the fiscal cliff again. Weapons sales will increase, all the same, because as every red-blooded American knows, the Kenyan Muslim Communist in the White House is just itching to take away their guns.
Look, this is not complicated. America possesses no monopoly on angry, violent people. What it does possess – what makes it truly exceptional – is an arsenal of guns in circulation that makes it far, far easier for its angry, violent people to arm themselves. In a sense, the complaints about new gun purchasing laws are right: there are 300 million guns in the United States already, 17 percent of them semi-automatics. Trying to restrict sales of new weapons is too pathetic even to be called a half-measure. The only way to make it truly difficult for disturbed young men like Lanza to get hold of guns would be to shrink that existing arsenal, and we all know that the chance of that happening is precisely zero. Because America doesn’t just have a predilection for guns; it has an infatuation, shared by no other place in the world. This isn’t about freedom, and it’s not about safety; it’s about morbid obsession.
December 15th, 2012 at 11:07AM
Alan: I too think the penchant for ghoulish sentimentality is worth watching. It’s one of the many ways people deny the savagery and suffering of events like these. It’s a variant of sickening best-sellers like The Lovely Bones.
It hurts a lot to get cut down in this way; and surely some of the children suffered for some time before they lost enough blood to die. It must have been like a battlefield in that kindergarten room, or like Babi Yar, with wails coming from some of the children as they died, in a bleeding heap, along with the already dead.
But I’m sure, as you say, that America will find a way to kitsch this event up in such a way as to tamp down any anger we might feel about it. Sorry, E.J.