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
September 3rd, 2013 at 9:06AM
It’s entertaining… but has there ever been a time when formerly-respectable cultural institutions were not canine-o-tropic?
September 3rd, 2013 at 1:51PM
In my first go round with college, which took place in the 80’s, one of my accounting professors told us how colleges changed immediately after WW2. The GI Bill created a whole different kind of student. These were battle hardened men, only a couple of years removed from combat. When a prof tried to pull the bullshit that they had gotten away with when their classes were composed of callow teenagers, many of those profs were thrown up against a wall, or out a window. The GI Bill students demanded answers, didn’t put up with nonsense, had seen too much, bled too much, to have anyone attempt to sandbag them. As my professor pointed out, it made the campuses much more dynamic, the students were far more involved in their own education, than prior generations.
Now, nearly seven decades later, we have a subdued student body, one that has been plied with luxurious dorms, easy credit, spa like recreation centers, who are lured to colleges with the implied notion that one can receive a degree without any curtailment of the need to get laid, loaded and drunk. They will become animated if their team wins games, any political awareness has been bred out of them, as one would do with cattle in order to get rid of some unwanted genetic trait. What the hell will it take for them, and their alumni brethren, to realize their universities are a scam and do anything about it?
September 4th, 2013 at 4:00PM
I like the Baffler, but this is a whiny, overwrought rant by someone who seems dimly aware at best of the complex factors driving diminishing returns in higher education. The solutions Frank proffers are especially cute: maybe “we,” whoever that is, should demand nationalization of universities—not a bad idea, but what stakeholders in higher education have any incentive to champion this? Or maybe students, whom frank said a few paragraphs before were unknowingly being preyed upon in their ignorance, should go abroad as some form of protest—as if this were a solution open to anyone but the upper middle class, and as if navigating the complexities of the global higher education would be easier. And the best of all, a nationwide student strike, as if the same kids who demand plush dorms and food courts with seared ahi tuna, whose awareness of these issues is even dimmer than Frank’s, will risk their futures to do that. Cool bro—see you at the sit-in on the quad, and don’t forget your hackey sack!
September 4th, 2013 at 10:12PM
tamade: Couldn’t agree more.
September 5th, 2013 at 12:00AM
@tamade: Are you familiar with the book, “Academically Adrift,” by Arum and Roksa? They point out that while undergrads aren’t learning, for the most part, they’re happy with that outcome. A bargain of sorts has been struck between universities and students, don’t demand too much from professors, and they won’t demand too much from students. Instead, come for the good times and sushi availability, and don’t worry about all that debt…
September 5th, 2013 at 12:35PM
@Charlie: someone just lent me that book! I can’t wait to dive in.
The parents of this generation, many raised in comfortable and prosperous conditions by the battle hardened GI students you mentioned in an earlier post, are equally complicit. I took my little sister to a tour for prospective students at my alma mater and was astonished by the asinine questions I heard parents ask prior to the tour. I almost feel like the students can be forgiven for caring too much about amenities because they’re 17–but it makes my ears bleed to hear a parent ask if the dorms have a concierge. So it was no wonder that as the tour guide walked us through campus a minute later, nothing was mentioned about the university’s incredible commitment to student retention, faculty engagement with students, and opportunities for undergraduate research.
The tour represented a heartbreaking inversion of the values I developed as a student there. I know graduates of this place who got incredible jobs, started successful businesses, got published in peer reviewed journals as undergraduates, obtained prestigious fellowships and scholarships, went on to the best schools for graduate and professional training, and who are now tenure-track professors.
This having been said, I got the sense that this tour wasn’t exactly for the demographic that aspires to those kinds of things anyways. And that lack of ambition and interest in the world is less innate than it is inculcated.