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
August 21st, 2013 at 8:06AM
I do wonder if these guys are inherently criminals or if it’s the result of a lifetime of entitlement. Neither excuses the behaviors, of course. I just think it would be interesting to know.
August 21st, 2013 at 8:57AM
JND, if you’re asking do they think of themselves, act out of, a sense of being criminal/thugs or largely are the products of a lifetime of entitlement than my experience is that it is more a matter of entitlement but increasingly this line is getting blurry as many recruits come from backgrounds that celebrate thug-life (not snitching and all). Would be more interesting from my perspective to study how the actual coaching, not the after the fact justifications, around violence (and of course fan support of,vicarious-participation in)undercuts any rhetorical nonsense about “character” development, let’s get to the powers that be and who perpetuate these gladiatorial games.
August 22nd, 2013 at 11:30AM
A few months ago, the Southeast Conference, the athletic league to which Bama belongs, announced that they will be teaming with ESPN to broadcast games until 2034. Terms weren’t revealed, but in prior years, about $3 billion was paid for the broadcast rights for SEC games. It stands to reason the money paid was greater for this deal.
ESPN, which is the 2000 pound gorilla of sports networks, is not going to pay that kind of money so as to not televise the best teams in the SEC, which, coincidentally, are the finest in the US. That network is what dictates how unis administer and oversee their teams, or in the case of the SEC, don’t administer or oversee their teams. Saban can recruit whoever the hell he wants, just so long as those guys win games. He’s untouchable, as is most of the rest of the conference, because the money they garner for their product is so huge, it overrides university/NCAA oversight and regulation. This is why, despite the apparent pay for play schemes at Auburn, the abject criminality at Florida, where dozens of players have been arrested or investigated for things such as murder (when Aaron Rodriguez was playing for the Gators, he was a suspect in a murder, just saying), the apparent corruption at Bama, not one of these teams is on any serious 2A probation. Follow the money, not hard to see why Saban can say the idiocy which is referenced in the article, and it’s considered poetic by the Bama faithful…
August 22nd, 2013 at 1:02PM
Sorry, not Aaron Rodriguez, but Aaron Hernandez played at Florida. Aaron Rodriguez was a former student who is now in graduate school. He would be upset that I mistook him for an accused killer, rather than the scholar that he has become…
August 22nd, 2013 at 4:55PM
This is one of the best sentences I’ve ever seen UD write: “UD searches high schools all over America in pursuit of evil geniuses, Leopolds and Loebs and Kaczynskis and infant hedge fund managers … all the most brilliant and original sociopaths, so that her school can win the annual Shanghai List Championship…”
Shanghai List Championship! I’m going to use this phrase EVERY FUCKING DAY from now on. I’ve never heard anyone reference it except for my institution’s PR office.
August 22nd, 2013 at 5:19PM
tamade: Many thanks! UD
August 23rd, 2013 at 10:12PM
Charlie: the typical top 20 Ncaa football team’s revenue represents under 3% of total university revenue.
Time to stop letting the tail wag the dog.
August 23rd, 2013 at 10:41PM
@Gtwma, Yeah, but football, including college, represents one of the largest, if not the largest, revenue producer for networks. That’s why we’ve had this overwhelming number of bowl games, because the ad revenue is massive. And why the 2A does nothing with the largest and most powerful of conferences is because, one, they’re owned by the universities, they pay the 2A’s bills, and two, they do nothing to impair network revenue.
Interesting that you point out revenue. Very few D1 teams turn a profit on their athletic programs. It’s the academic side that needs to subsidize the costs of athletics. And the biggest problem with college sports is the massive athletic buildouts which universities engage in in order to maintain high caliber teams. E.G., University of Oregon built the most expensive bball arena in America. They won’t tell us the exact cost, but the public bonds that were used to finance the bulk of the monstrosity is upwards of $200 million. Upshot is that they can’t fill the place for men’s basketball, so they’re losing money. If we were to look at the balance sheet for Oregon, we would see just how much of burden the athletic program is for the university. And that’s true for growing numbers of universities.
Time, indeed, to stop letting the tail wag the dog….