Here’s a good formulation of the problem:
This is a typical problem around the country. College demographics are changing and nowhere is that more clear that at the University of Georgia. The student body is approaching 65% women and 35% men. Higher admission standards coupled with more prestigious academic programs result in fewer legacy students. The typical Georgia student doesn’t show up for a basketball game.
The question, then, is how to reverse these trends.
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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
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The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
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I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
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As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
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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.
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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 25th, 2014 at 9:53AM
all we are saying is give bubbas a chance…
June 25th, 2014 at 11:37AM
dmf, rock on, bro’.
Some years back our local Podunk Tech team was leaving its pre-game luncheon. Looking at those behemoths, some of whom know to a certainty they’re being used, I remarked to the woman I was with, “They’ve got foreheads, they’ve got chins, aren’t they supposed to have faces in the middle?”
We, both of us, are way past college age, but I thought she almost peed herself with laughter.
June 25th, 2014 at 11:42AM
This has been taking place within the California State University system for quite some time. All but a handful of those schools have football teams anymore, and the reason that they got rid of them was because of demographics. The average CalState student was, up to about a decade ago, female, older, late 20’s, early 30’s, many worked. That ain’t the marketing segment that’s waiting in line for tickets, tailgating, painting their faces, patronizing local watering holes on game day, burning sofas, or getting into bar fights after games….
June 25th, 2014 at 3:01PM
“The question, then, is how to reverse these trends.”
unfortunately, there are all too many presidents and athletic directors who really see it that way… as you tirelessly document.
June 26th, 2014 at 11:44AM
… and because Title IX requires proportional spending on women’s athletics, the shifting gender balance is making football more and more expensive as attendance declines.