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
July 14th, 2014 at 10:15PM
There you go. It’s like discussing your parents’ sex life. They might well have discussed their sex life with each other – they just didn’t feel it was appropriate to share it with you. I wonder what Gordimer would have found as a life-long adult in her original community?
I’ve found on a number of occasions that older people were sparing me their inwardness until I was old enough to deal with it. One of the inherent problems of moving away at 17 or 18 is that you never really know your home town the way the people who stay do. There’s a lot that can be encoded in talk about children and golf. Local school policy and water rights, for example – things that 15 year olds don’t necessarily cotton onto.
My favorite examples of fiction writers who did come home or stay or whatever are both considered writers of wildly unreliable narrators – Eudora Welty and Walker Percy (Flannery O’Connor is actually a producer of unreliable narrators – wonderful stuff, but not particularly reliable). Gordimer? Who knows.
July 15th, 2014 at 12:14AM
Michael: Yes. Maybe Gordimer’s right that they really had no inner lives, but of course she’s probably terribly wrong. Terribly impatient and imperceptive.
I think comments like hers are interesting as examples of how certain people break away from their roots. It sometimes feels like a rather crude maneuver: In order to make a clean (violent?) break, you’ve sort of got to cast the embodiments of your past as irredeemable in some fundamental way…
July 15th, 2014 at 9:30AM
Interesting posts.
July 15th, 2014 at 9:42AM
College isn’t as it was back in Gordimer’s time, much of the student body was lured to University of Oregon, and at many other unis, by the promise of a damn good time, including sports. I didn’t know her, but I highly doubt that Gordimer attended her university because she saw the school’s football team on cable….