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
January 6th, 2014 at 12:46PM
You have a perspective problem. The way to phrase your question is: “Why does a great big $21 billion hedge fund find it useful to have a little old university attached?” and then the answer falls out easily: undemanding investors, social cachet, and tax benefits. Yale’s the tail, the hedge fund is the dog. Wag, wag.
January 6th, 2014 at 5:17PM
Out of curiosity, do you think it is a problem that Yale has a $20B endowment? Clearly it gives them a lot of financial power, but most endowments are also used to help fund university operations, including settling legal disputes. However, I don’t think Yale’s endowment encourages professors to be ageist and sexist bastards. They probably don’t need any help in that regard.
But on the issue of the endowment, is it preferable for a university to have a much smaller endowment (or no endowment) and fully fund operations through tuition and other fees?
You are right in that the endowment protects the university by allowing them to fight and or settle legal claims. But that seems to be a good thing, in that 99.99% of the university had nothing to do with this case and the university shouldn’t be forced to bankruptcy by the actions of a few neanderthals. $20B is above and beyond what is needed in almost all instances, but you could make your same argument about much smaller endowments as well.
January 6th, 2014 at 7:43PM
Stephen: I have nothing against robust endowments, but Harvard (approaching 40 billion) and Yale are ridiculous. It’s obscene money-hoarding in the context of a world in need.
January 7th, 2014 at 1:05PM
The badly underfunded midwestern R-1 where I work has an annual budget of $1 billion. Yale, I would tend to suspect, spends more money annually. Applying the standard rule that one can take about 5% out of an endowment each year and still retain its inflation-adjusted purchasing power (as a result of lower interest rates, a number of institutions have reduced that 5% figure to 4%, or even less)a $20 billion endowment would just about fund the midwestern R-1 where I work. As a public institution, we receive money from the state government–not as much as we might like, but, of course, Yale does not receive such funds. Seen in that light, a $20 billion endowment is not such an exorbitant accumulation of wealth.
January 7th, 2014 at 1:33PM
In the provinces: How large is your student body?