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
April 4th, 2014 at 10:30AM
loving yer higher-ed column, reminds me of the scene in the Sopranos when the mobster’s wife is in a head-shrink-ing session and she tries to make it all about her husband so the analyst says to her just so someone has said it straight to you if you don’t get proactive and make some real changes this situation will destroy you and your children…
April 6th, 2014 at 10:37AM
Yes, where are the faculty?
At my own humble institution, a dozen of us proffies recently proposed a set of revisions to the Athletics Program Handbook and submitted it to the intercollegiate athletics policy committee.
Our idea is to weave our concerns (the usual concerns) into the bureaucratic fabric of the athletics program. To give just one example: we’re asking that the Coach Evaluation Form explicitly require that each coach’s players be retained and graduate at a rate equal to or above the institutional average. This would effectively mandate that coaches would be evaluated as “Needs Improvement” (essentially an “F”) if they continue to recruit academically marginal, one-and-done “students.”
Also, by recording an official recognition of problematic practices, this policy would create greater exposure for the institution in the event of a scandal. It would take away any plausible deniability, and thus improve the athletics program’s behavior up front. Such is our hope, anyway.
The thing is, this kind of stuff is a LOT of work: drafting proposals; gaining consensus among faculty members; sitting in athletics program meetings with a bunch of foot-dragging, poorly educated sports types; trying to reframe issues in ways that will appeal to a jockish set of values and otherwise ransacking one’s bag of rhetorical tricks; calling in political favors; etc., etc. And always at the back of one’s mind is the knowledge that all we faculty can really do is to get this policy committee to endorse recommendations, not set actual policy. The Athletics Director reports directly to the president, and final decisions are up to him.
So on the one hand I’m proud of the faculty who’ve been working with me on this, but I can understand why so many others feel it would be a waste of their time.