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
December 9th, 2014 at 11:43AM
I read Yoffe piece yesterday. If it is substantially true, my heart goes out to the poor kid who was accused. My second thought was: what if (as is likely true of parts of the Virginia story) Yoffe’s description of the Michigan male’s innocence, and his struggles to prove it, itself proved false. That would no more invalidate many of her points than the Rolling Stone’s story’s defects invalidated the concerns with a culture of alcohol, rape, and general disrespecting women on campuses. No more than the possibility that one global warming researcher’s mistake in a particular study invalidates the consensus of serious scientists.
The difficulty is with universities sorting accusations in a way most likely to get them right, because there is no such thing as even near certainty, except in unusual cases. Some of the investigative procedures offend literal due process (applicable only state schools) and aspirational due process (private schools). Note the Harvard Law professors (of both genders) complaint whose ideas cover other schools as well:
“Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation”
I would be as heartbroken for a falsely accused son, who couldn’t clear his record and move on with life, as for a daughter who was assaulted and injured without real possibility of redress.
So what to do with one’s intuition that women are especially, disproportionately, aggrieved in all of this?
The best we can do is to provide support,* take these claims seriously (requiring cultural changes in many places), investigate, and, when they prove especially plausible, prosecute them under a set of procedures that are fair to both accuser and accused. And of course we need to change attitudes on campus about women’s legal rights and moral claim to equality and dignity and also about the use of alcohol.
None of this is a surprise. I guess reform often sounds platitudinous and it can’t be done in one flashy stroke. It involves the hard work of drafting good disciplinary rules and procedures, appointing responsible faculty and students to the adjudicatory committees, and, for those faculty and students, doing the hard work of considering evidence with care and common sense.
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*The support part does not need to be even-handed. Right from the start an accuser can be provided with a counselor and an advocate, sympathetic to her claims.