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
May 3rd, 2013 at 5:18AM
This is an odd one. Obviously, the Department’s record on hiring–much less tenuring–women is abysmal. There’s a real problem there, and if I were dean, I wouldn’t approve any shortlist without at least one or two women candidates for at least the next 10 years (and I would carefully scrutinize any hiring decision in which a man was chosen over a woman).
On the other hand, the Department apparently voted to support Prof. Hatcher, after which she was rejected by the Dean, Provost, and Chancellor. In my experience, this sort of thing happens for one of three reasons. Either a) the assistant professor has done or said something to piss off the administration (no hint of that in the article); b) money’s tight (apparently not: they seem to have tenured other professors during the same period); or c) the dean thinks the Department has been too lenient in its judgment of the candidate’s credentials (maybe the outside letters were lukewarm to scathing).
It’s hard to know from the information provided, but I suspect the answer might well be “c”. That would put the dean in quite a bind: either reject for tenure the only woman in a department with a dreadful history, or approve someone who would not otherwise make the cut. That’s a tough call, and I wouldn’t want to be the person who had to make it.
May 3rd, 2013 at 7:27AM
TAFKAU: I think you’re likely to be right about all of that. I’d only differ in this respect: Although of course one can’t be sure without reading her work (I’ve not done that), this woman seems to have been a plausible candidate for tenure. And if you have SIU’s record on hiring/tenuring women (an appalling one), AND if the department has strongly supported her (which it seems to have done), the wise thing to have done would have been to grant her tenure. Even if you take a perfectly cynical, self-interested approach – such a person may well sue, may well generate significant expense and negative publicity for the university (a university already in the pits for many reasons), and may indeed win her suit – tenuring is the way of wisdom.
And the event, having become broadly known, may well discourage other women from considering offers — so SIU can go another fifty years with no tenured women.
If the event generates real attention (the details are shocking enough to do that), SIU will also have to weather unwelcome scrutiny of the larger intellectual integrity of the place. A plausible candidate turned down for tenure at an institution whose president plagiarized his dissertation!
May 3rd, 2013 at 12:58PM
Thanks to the above for insider skinny. This is where a non-prof (as I am) gets the hell out of Dodge. On the other hand, I know personally a prof who brought unique academic skills to his department who was denied tenure as a result of a quarrel between his dean and the university president. He was the designated chump, and, yes, he threatened suit. The professor moved on where he was named department chair and extended tenure right off the bat at a school roughly the same as the one he’d been booted from.
May 3rd, 2013 at 2:41PM
Wow.
If there’s ever been a poster child for some targeted senior hires with tenure that’s the department.
May 4th, 2013 at 7:26AM
That department is pretty colorless, too, and lacking any reference to the global south.
May 4th, 2013 at 11:22AM
By the by, Glenn Poshard was within a whisker of being our Gov here in IL about a decade ago. It was a tight race. He lost to George Ryan who went straight from the smokey back room to the pokey (just finished his stint in the Big House). It’s fair to say Poshard lost by a hair or hairs. A few voters couldn’t get over the goatee that made him look like Col Sanders. A razor may have may have put him in the governor’s chair. Despite his troubles at SIU, he was by far the best candidate. Such is IL.