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
September 7th, 2014 at 8:47AM
Universities and Big Medicine’s Iron Pyramid? Physicians, Big Pharma, hospitals, medical equipment makers, and insurers.
Ask a friend why he’s medically insured. He’ll tell you it’s part of his compensation. You point out the guy making five times what he does has the same insurance plan, so how can that be compensation for work performed? You ask your friend why his wife and kids are insured even though they don’t work for your employer at all. You’ll be lucky if your friend just walks away in a huff.
Ask a university prof, including econ and poli sci types, the same thing, and you’ll almost surely get the same stock answers and treatment.
The advantage in medical transactions conferred upon beneficiaries by group health insurance is so astounding, even university profs will ignore simple observations that tell against them to preserve that advantage from scrutiny.
A very few academic specialists know the origins and meaning of group health insurance. But, most American universities are either unwittingly or deliberately agents of the Commissariat for Medical Propaganda.
I wish it weren’t so, and I’m willing to be corrected.
September 7th, 2014 at 3:48PM
I’m a bit less sanguine (or at least a bit more inclined to wonder what’s under the patina, and how real the patina is). I teach writing in the disciplines, and spend a good deal of time trying to help students understand what constitutes original research in their fields (and a bit more time trying to stay one step ahead of them by figuring it out myself). I also try to teach them about how the traditional scholarly peer-review process works, and how to identify work that has undergone that process. I’ve long had to discuss “grey literature” (which seems to have various meanings, but in the context of my classes, usually means government and think-tank reports on subjects of public-policy interest that use scholarly methods, but aren’t peer-reviewed in the traditional way, or published in a scholarly journal; usually they’re published to the web by the relevant agency or think tank). More and more, students seem to be turning up similar reports and “white papers” and such produced by university-affiliated “institutes” or “centers” that apparently work, and publish, much like think tanks (and often seem to be presidents’, provosts’, and/or deans’ pet projects, sometimes created with the apparent encouragement — i.e. funding — of big donors). I don’t know exactly how work produced for such entities figures into tenure and promotion decisions, but I can’t help but assume that it doesn’t hurt the participants’ careers, despite not being traditionally peer-reviewed. While I (and the librarians) are still telling students a peer-review and traditional-publication-based narrative of how scholarship works, I have a feeling that there’s another, possibly more powerful, mechanism for producing “scholarship” on matters of public (and definitely political, and perhaps commercial) interest out there that bypasses some of the traditional niceties.
And we haven’t even gotten into the pressure for professors to hire out as consultants, either on their own or their universities’ behalfs.