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
March 19th, 2014 at 6:45PM
Thanks for the interesting post. As someone who grew up in small-town Alabama, where trailer parks are still pretty prevalent, it’s disconcerting to me to hear mobile homes are “exotic.” Must be how the native Algerians felt when learning Delacroix and the French Romantics had a patent industry painting colorful bazaars as representations of “the other” for patrons from the Metropole. Sigh.
I had friends and school-mates who lived in trailers; they were as natural a part of the built environment as the post office or town square or dogwood clusters. One running joke was about the proverbial redneck with his $10,000 mobile home and his $60,000 bass boat parked outside. News accounts always reported terrible carnage whenever tornadoes plowed through trailer parks, flinging the flimsy manufactured homes like so many children’s toys in the path of a tantrum.
One of my favorite passages from Rick Bragg turns evocations of trailers as part of daily life into near-poetry:
“All he demands is that once in a blue moon I will sit with him on the barn where he stores his pickup and bass boat and tell him about where I’ve been, what I’ve seen. In return he brings me home, all the way home, telling about layoffs at the mill, about who died and where the funeral was. He tells me about babies born, about how his new saw can cut through a green pine in nothing flat, and how ol’ Chuckle Head in Websters Chapel got locked out of his trailer again. He is a grand storyteller, much, much better than me.”
Interestingly enough, one of the side effects of the late nineties/early aughts housing bubble was the gradual diminishing of trailer parks along roadsides in the rural South. I imagine they’ve been making a comeback the last few years.
Once I made a wrong turn near Lexington, Virginia, and ended up driving down a gravel back road in waning autumn light looking for my destination, only to jolt my way into a clearing where a little girl in a yellow sun-dress and a barefooted boy in denim overalls were tossing back and forth an inflatable ball in front of the most dilapidated trailer I’d ever seen inhabited — tar paper, peeling paint from the metal window frames, crumpled seventies beige siding. Even the cinder blocks at the base looked like they were sagging. The little girl dropped the ball, which slowly rolled until still, and she and I locked eyes as I backed up my car. Both children went quiet and simply stood there as I turned around and headed back up the road. It was like something out of Erskine Caldwell’s south via an Edward Hopper painting.
March 19th, 2014 at 7:04PM
Crimson05er: Your beautiful writing extends the pleasure and fascination of that article for me. Thanks.
August 25th, 2015 at 12:38PM
[…] she liked as much as Drew Jubera’s essay for GQ on southern-football junior colleges was about trailer parks, and she lighted on that piece in the same […]