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
June 1st, 2014 at 1:56AM
Keep in mind the author is the former head of the NCAA infractions committee, now a lawyer for a firm specializing in helping athletic departments deal with infractions. He has every incentive to blame what’s happening on the faculty, rather on the NCAA cartel, and that is what he is doing.
June 1st, 2014 at 2:08AM
UO Matters: The problem (and one that the author of the piece should have tried to clarify) is that “the NCAA cartel” and big-time sports university faculty/administration are pretty much the same thing. That is, the NCAA is basically run by coaches, administrators, and indeed faculty from the sports factories. So I’m not sure I agree that the distinction between the cartel and the faculty that you draw is compelling.
June 1st, 2014 at 7:56AM
“…how many points were in a three-point shot?” Trick question! I would answer “zero”, since there are no points for just the shot. Of course, if the ball goes in the basket, then there are three.
June 1st, 2014 at 8:45AM
Polish Peter: Funny!
June 1st, 2014 at 10:29AM
How many points in a three-point shot?
A trick question indeed! One that definitely needs to be, as we say, problematized.
What IS a three-point shot, anyway? A shot made from behind the arc that results in the ball going into the basket? OK, sure, but not so fast. What about all those shots made from behind the arc during the pre-game shoot-around? Do those count for three points each? Of course not. Shots made from behind the arc only count as three points under certain conditions, the conditions that demarcate the game itself from everything that is not the game. (Of course, just as we can ask “What is a three-point shot?” we may also ask, “What did we just mean by ‘the game itself'”?)
The shot is not “really” a three-point shot unless it occurs under something we might call, I dunno, a set of felicity conditions. At this point maybe we should be calling in the aid of John Austin and thinking about the three-point shot in a basketball game as performative in a way analogous to the utterance “I do” in a marriage ceremony. A whole new way to think about athletics as “performance”….
We can also ask, What is a “point”? Is it natural or wholly conventional? That is, does it exist independently of all the social structures that make basketball possible–everything from basketball leagues to the local city council ordinances that pay for the basketball courts at the park to the informal conventions that govern pickup games?
If a player makes a three-point shot during a game, but the scorekeeper never officially records it, what then? Suppose the scorekeeper, contra the referee, personally feels that the player had a toe on the line, making the shot, in her view, a two-point shot. She still has to record three points; if she doesn’t, she will presumably be fired by someone with the authority to fire her. Does that mean that the notion of a “point” is somehow bound up with a set of power relations?
If this seems outlandish, think of what occasionally happens at the local park when the legitimacy of a three-point shot is disputed in a pickup game, and the adjudication of that dispute escalates from argumentation to fisticuffs. What is the difference between the adjudication of such disputes on the playground and in the NCAA?
Can we better understand what a “point” is by dragging in Hobbes?
What is the point of asking “What is a point”? I like to ask these sorts of questions in my classes partly to help clarify certain ideas in philosophy and lit theory in a way that might engage the athletes and sports junkies sitting in the back row, and partly to establish a kind of professorial authority, as a way of saying to the back row, “Hey, guys–even when it comes to sports you don’t really know anything, so listen up.” And partly, I confess, just to f*ck with their minds.
For their own good, of course.
June 1st, 2014 at 10:40AM
Dr_Doctorstein: A +++
June 1st, 2014 at 5:32PM
that some tenured professors at leading research universities are, in fact, “sports whores” is a profoundly disturbing phenomenon. can anyone explain it, please?
June 1st, 2014 at 5:55PM
John: I think the simplest explanation is that sports factory universities decades ago figured out that the key is actually creating departments, fields of study, seemingly legitimate branches of knowledge within the university, that are actually about little more than advancing the school’s football and basketball programs. These are where the bogus classes take place, where sports whore professors are located, etc. If you look at just two recent scandals that preceded Chapel Hill – Auburn and SUNY Binghamton – you find that the sports whore was a department chair (same thing at Chapel Hill). So we’re talking about whore departments, whore department heads, whore administrators. And of course university presidents like Gordon Gee are … well, you fill in the blank.
As to the larger question – why would a professor do this? I don’t think these people are really what you’d call professors. From the start, they never were. They were fans with advanced degrees in their favorite subject: jocks and how to serve them.