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
November 8th, 2014 at 5:53PM
Penn State only gets about 6% of its income from the state of Pennsylvania. Like most “state” universities, it is essentially private because of the states’ abandonment of higher education funding.
November 8th, 2014 at 7:26PM
anon: Yes. But I had more in mind than the straightforward six percent direct funding from the locals. Penn State gets all kinds of tax breaks, courtesy of Pennsylvania taxpayers and all other taxpayers.
November 8th, 2014 at 8:41PM
Whoever is paying it, it’s $165M that could have been used for advancing the teaching and research mission of a flagship state university. Same with UNC. If “from selection of a major to selection of courses, the UNC football program controlled football student-athletes’ academic track…” can be demonstrated, they can’t argue that the students simply made bad choices.
November 9th, 2014 at 10:47PM
Repetition doesn’t make it less wrong, UD. Payments are coming from football revenue reserves, insurance policies, and interest income from auxiliary enterprises. Now you can draw really convoluted lines from taxpayers to charitable donation deductions to football revenues, but the notion that this is some enormous burden on Pennsylvania or American taxpayers is UD’s version of American media panic over Ebola. Sure, there’s something worth noting, but the hysteria is far out of proportion to reality. And there’s no real impact on the academics either. Football and auxiliary dollars are kept separate from the academic budgets. $165M sounds like a lot. It’s barely 1% of PSU income during that time period.
November 10th, 2014 at 12:15AM
anon: I think the convolution is coming from your side. As Polish Peter notes, this enormous sum represents money that could have been used to educate people – which, let me point out, is the purpose of a university. The money is not there to stage football games; it’s there to perform a surpassingly important social role: the education of a citizenry. Because we all agree that this is a surpassingly important function, we agree to allow amazing tax benefits to accrue to institutions like Penn State.
As to your nice neat picture of a clean separation of academic and athletic budgets — please. I’ve yet to see a budget from a big sports school (or a little one, come to think of it) that has anything resembling transparency.
I really don’t think the best response to this immense national scandal – not just Penn State’s squandering of its reputation, of course, but all the other sports schools in the news just this week (UNC will certainly pay out a great deal more than $165 million in its own scandal; and of course Penn State isn’t yet finished paying up) is there, there, little lady, $165 mill is a drop in the bucket.
November 10th, 2014 at 10:48PM
While I don’t know what the arrangements at Penn State and UNC are, a lot of universities are self-insured, so general funds probably are being tapped eventually for the payouts these messes require. $165M probably is a small part of the Penn State revenue, but PSU needs every dollar it can get. Just to put it in perspective, the PSU endowment is only about $3B, according to Wikipedia. Assuming a typical spending rate of about 5%, that amount only yields about $150M in spendable funds in any given year. The rest has to be made up in tuition, state appropriations, and other revenue. So wherever it comes from, $165M in revenue at a school like Penn State isn’t something that can easily be written off. See http://budget.psu.edu/Openbudget/default.aspx for an illuminating tour through Penn State’s budget.
November 11th, 2014 at 1:20AM
@anon, the debt for athletic buildouts isn’t consigned to the athletic department, it is a taxpayer obligation and the collateral for that debt are the guaranteed income streams from student loan debt. Wall Street money palaces, which administrate and invest in that public debt, aren’t stupid enough to think that ticket revenue is going to be stable enough for the multi-decade terms of those loans. Of course, the athletic department isn’t on the hook if those bonds go bad, the taxpayer ultimately is when USAAmerican finally realize the scam of student loan debt.