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
February 19th, 2013 at 11:19AM
In a lower register of weirdo-isms, I wonder about those professors who end up on teevee for doing, say, calculus lectures in hip-hop. What is up with that?
February 19th, 2013 at 12:50PM
TR: I’ve never forgotten the hic/haec/hoc declensions, because Mrs Washer, my high school Latin teacher, did it as a cheer.
February 19th, 2013 at 1:19PM
I taught at Columbia during my graduate program there and then for a few years afterward, teaching a night section of a humanities course as a hobby, and I can attest that students hate this science course. Those of a scientific bent are indignant that they have to take a survey course that’s designed for general consumption, whilst those who aren’t so minded resent having to do a required science course at all. I can imagine that such faculty as this guy–who spends much of his time working at a particle accelerator in Switzerland (http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/sep_oct10/around_the_quads7)–like teaching this intro course just about as much as the students like to sit through it. Indeed, his reviews (http://culpa.info/professors/3242) suggest that he frequently let his students out early and canceled classes. My guess is that he was dragooned into teaching a section of this by his department or that everyone in Physics is compelled to teach a section every few years. I feel sorry for his students.
February 19th, 2013 at 6:09PM
@JKW: Nothing can excuse the behavior of this professor but you make me feel less sympathetic towards his students if they really resent having to take a course in science. I would have imagined that Columbia, as much as any university, is where broad learning is celebrated, not resented. What a pity if I was wrong.
February 19th, 2013 at 8:47PM
@Pete: I agree with you. I can’t speak to the course itself, never having taken it, but I have always perceived a sort of irritation on the part of the students that they have to sit through it. Mind you, they’re careful to couch their irritation in language of specific complaint about aspects of the course (too general, not general enough, hops around too much, etc.). They say much the same thing about the composition course, though, naturally, in very polite language.
February 20th, 2013 at 11:27AM
JKW…”Those of a scientific bent are indignant that they have to take a survey course that’s designed for general consumption, whilst those who aren’t so minded resent having to do a required science course at all.”
I’d say that anyone who is so little interested in the world around him that he resents having to take a single science course doesn’t belong in a university at all. And I’d think that someone who *is* a science major could take an opportunity to learn something about scientific fields other than the one he’s specializing in.
Depressing.