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
November 3rd, 2013 at 10:26PM
UD, thanks for maintaining this theme, i.e., the empty stadium syndrome, and the administration/media rage at a growing apathy to all things football.
The bright lights who run our universities seem understood something that anyone else readily knows, that is, the customer is never fucking wrong. If they don’t want your product or service, then that is your problem, not theirs. Administrators are enraged that their core belief that CFB will always create its own demand are being negated and shoved back up their suites. Which means that the 1/2 billion dollar football stadium renovation being promoted by uni/Wall Street/developer hucksters at Texas A&M may produce huge swaths of empty seats, and the fact that the school may never make its money back. The audience doesn’t want it, so don’t spend any more money on CFB, admins.
November 4th, 2013 at 3:34AM
The universities have brought this on themselves. Stadiums are built to accommodate the egos of the coaches and the highly sought after recruits, not the number of student and non-student fans likely to attend the games.
My university’s stadium seats 85,000+ fans, yet the 48,000 students, who have no choice but pay a $7.90 per credit hour “athletic fee,” have been allotted just 16,000 of those seats. The tickets are “free,” on a first come, first served basis; students can only get one game ticket at a time, and the lines are long for most games. All of the student seats are in the end-zone area. For basketball, the students are allotted about 2,000 seats out of 15,000 in the arena. All are behind the baskets.
Students enroll in classes totaling approximately 494,000 credit hours per semester. At $7.90 per credit hour, the PER SEMESTER revenue going to the athletic department is approximately $3.9 million. They need it, too.
Before they can sell bonds to raise the revenue to over-build stadiums and other OPEC-country worthy facilities, they must have a substantial, guaranteed revenue stream. Students haven’t been able to pay for athletic tickets only if they’re interested since back in the 90’s.
While it’s true that students will have the opportunity to enjoy the football stadium, only students athletes can enjoy the indoor football practice field, and state of the art training facility that were also funded with student tuition dollars.
It’s not cheap to play Keeping Up With the Sabans (and Ducks), but it’s what the head coach and All-American quality recruits have come to expect. Students on financial aid end up paying far more than $7.90 per credit hour — some may be paying their athletic fee, years into the future.
November 4th, 2013 at 8:46AM
Great comment buried in there:
“How many UMD symphony orchestra concerts did you attend as a student? If the answer is less than “all of them,” then please, if you weren’t going to support your school, you should’ve gone somewhere else.
Repeat for all theatrical performances, all forensics matches, all student art showings, all student film showings, all baseball games, all lacrosse games, all soccer games, all track meets, etc.
Or does it only count as “supporting the school” if they’re doing the things *you* think matter?”
November 4th, 2013 at 12:10PM
Maybe all those students who are not in the stadium are at their jobs so they can afford to attend college? which is as expensive as it is partly because football costs so much to support?