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 25th, 2014 at 1:55PM
UD, I’m surprised you approve these weird (and pretzel-phrased) arguments for Salaita. This is hardly good writing; look at all the double negatives the Wilson quote relies on. What does it mean if we work out all these negations? He seems to say that universities should remain neutral about scholars’ “viewpoints,” that demonstrated “respect” for any particular idea beyond the idea of scholarly inquiry itself cannot be a condition of employment. But then he introduces this gloriously ambiguous double negative – disrespect for false beliefs. What’s the status of that?
Clearly, it’s good to disrespect false beliefs, even if it is not necessary to respect true ones, since we don’t fully know these yet. It would be preposterous to fire anyone for disrespecting self-evidently false beliefs like Nazism, terrorism, racism, etc. But it’s presumably equally preposterous to respect these false beliefs. So what should a university do about people who respect, or fail to sufficiently disrespect, them? Are these “protected viewpoints,” or grounds for dismissal? By the end of the paragraph, it’s clear that Wilson finds the idea of protecting all viewpoints regardless of their substance to be as preposterous as firing professors for disrespecting false viewpoints. So, what the hell is he actually saying? What principle is he defending here? The whole argument rests on distinguishing false from not-false viewpoints. And how do we do that? All I can discern from this is that there are a number of political positions which Wilson and his friends believe are indisputably false beliefs (Nazism, racism, and so on, but maybe not anti-Semitism b/c that’s so much more complex), and others he believes can be subject to legitimate dispute (the very complex relationship b/w anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism), and the university should make its personnel decisions according to his framework of truth and falsehood in belief.
Why not simply take the straightforwardly proceduralist position? Any opinion anyone posts on social media is not cause for firing him (unless it’s an actionable threat of violence, or child pornography, or something similarly illegal). We should expect “respect” from professors for their actual students rather than hypothetical groups of people who might one day be his students, and evidence of mistreating individual students is grounds for discipline. Tweeting, unless it’s such an attack on an individual student, never reaches this threshold.
August 25th, 2014 at 2:23PM
This is where the non-prof gets the hell out of Dodge:).
August 5th, 2015 at 7:46AM
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