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
October 29th, 2014 at 7:10AM
He doesn’t do it very well. $1.8 billion in annual income equates to $2.6 million per undergrad only if Harvard had 700 undergrads. It actually has about 7000, so he’s off by a factor of ten. And of course nobody, not even Harvard itself, thinks that its chief mission is educating undergrads.
October 29th, 2014 at 7:41AM
johnshade: If you’re right and Easterbrook’s wrong (you’re certainly right about the number of undergrads), that still leaves Harvard with around $260,000 per year per undergrad.
October 29th, 2014 at 4:19PM
Yes, but it also has a law school, med school, public health school, B-school and lots of PhD programs to run. Easterbrook’s analysis is little more than a miscalculated sound bite. (I am right on the math, which is simple division.) Interestingly, he notes later on that the principal of the endowment is $5.3 million per undergrad, and here his division is correct; he failed to notice that his annual per-undergrad number would, if true, represent a fifty percent annual return on the endowment, which not even Harvard’s vaunted money managers could claim.
I actually don’t disagree with his bottom line. I don’t give to Harvard; they don’t need my money. They could easily go tuition-free, like Olin and Cooper Union, but then they couldn’t use financial aid (which I gather is genuinely need based, and generous) to price-discriminate against the rich parents who send their kids there.
God, I can’t believe I’m even half-heartedly defending Harvard. That’s depressing. I guess I dislike superficial pundits like Easterbrook even more.
October 29th, 2014 at 4:56PM
johnshade: Glad to hear you don’t give to Harvard. I suspect quite a few others have made the same decision. Indeed I’ll predict that giving to Harvard will soon look like giving to politicians in this country: It’ll be largely about absolutely enormous contributions from a handful of super-rich.
October 29th, 2014 at 6:47PM
If the very affluent are willing to give to educational institutions relatively unfettered*, what’s the complaint?
it beats what governments are willing to do…
if the institutions accept fetters, its on them, not the rich guys.
October 29th, 2014 at 7:25PM
I think the complaint is similar to the complaint people make about rich people taking over the business of donating to politicians. Ultimately of course much of this activity is about influence and power.
To take a smaller example, about which I’ve written a lot on this blog, Phil Knight and Boone Pickens have bought their way to a significant degree of control over university football programs. And that means significant control over universities.
August 19th, 2015 at 8:34AM
[…] sorts of proposals have come forward, most having to do with messing up those exemptions, although a few appeal directly to Harvard alumni to divert their contributions to actually worthy […]