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
August 10th, 2014 at 12:53PM
Harvard’s need-based aid is pretty generous. I fail to see the problem with charging the ultra-rich tuition to send their kids there. If it’s free for everyone, doesn’t that just encourage the rich to go to Harvard instead of Princeton and make it harder for regular people to get in? I’m sure someone’s done a study on this.
August 10th, 2014 at 1:19PM
Are there now any really large “non-profits” worthy of that name? Perhaps a few: none comes to mind. Sure: no equity owners, but oh those salaries, that power and prestige, distributed right to the top and to the top’s infrastructure.
August 10th, 2014 at 1:28PM
Afterthought: maybe end “own” ments. Perhaps they’re living beyond their ends.
August 10th, 2014 at 1:47PM
Greg: End “own” ments is good.
August 10th, 2014 at 2:57PM
Greg…”no equity owners, but oh those salaries, that power and prestige”..the way I put it is that “nonprofit” often means only that there are no pesky shareholders with whom the loot must be shared.
August 10th, 2014 at 3:11PM
Surely we should be concerned about the increasingly-dominant role that Harvard and similar institutions are playing in the selection of future elites. Do we really want our choice of political leaders, business leaders, researchers receiving major grants, etc, to be based largely on the preferences of Ivy League admissions officers?
Here’s Peter Drucker (Austrian, went to university in Germany), writing back in 1969:
“One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman. Yet this is the flexibility Europe needs in order to overcome the brain drain and to close the technology gap.”
American has come much closer to accepting the claim of Harvard Law School (for example) to have the social dominance of a Grande Ecole than it had when Drucker wrote the above.
August 10th, 2014 at 4:34PM
It’s unconscionable that Harvard charges its undergraduates any fees at all, but that’s only the start of it. The only way to really get at the structural unfairness of elite school entry would be to introduce admission by lot. Allow anyone who graduates in the top 5% of their high school cohort to apply, then put all the names in a big goldfish bowl and have Drew Faust (perhaps dressed in dungarees and a straw hat, chewing thoughtfully on a stalk of wheat) pull them out one at a time.
August 10th, 2014 at 4:36PM
Alan: Drew’s Draw!