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
March 8th, 2015 at 8:56AM
Carl is a powerful example for all of the profs out there who say what can we poor weak us do about corruption on campuses (all while selling themselves as somehow in the business of forming future active/responsible citizens) but he is sadly all too right about the incentives/oversight. The pressures are now even greater on researchers than ever before with less federal funding, more pressure from state governments to be in partnerships with businesses, even in getting hired now as junior faculty one is expected to be bringing research dollars to the job/school.
March 8th, 2015 at 10:38AM
President Eisenhower presciently warned about this trend when he discussed the government-academic complex: “… research has become … more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.… the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity… The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
Today we see another variant on Eisenhower’s theme – the entry of for-profit corporations into academic medicine – with much the same dangers. In the business research model patients are viewed as commodities and the clinical studies conducted are shaped by the marketing departments of pharmaceutical corporations. Some years ago I coined the term experimercial for such pretend clinical trials. It is bad enough when unforeseen harm occurs in a genuine clinical study – but it is insufferable when it occurs in an experimercial. The commercial pressure to enroll dubiously appropriate subjects is very real. Hitting the numbers can become the main objective because nowadays the investigators themselves don’t run the analyses in multi-center studies. Kudos to Carl Elliott.
March 8th, 2015 at 2:58PM
Having attended the senate faculty hearing and listened to Kaler attempt to answer questions that were directed at him, it now seems improbable to me that any human being could ever endure such pain again. No matter the subject matter of the question being asked, Kaler had a stock answer, and if that didn’t work he resorted to his backup line that everything happened before he arrived on campus…and therefore can’t be held accountable. The most compelling question still unanswered is …where is he getting his information from? Besides the department of psychiatry chair and the principal rogue study investigator the only common denominator is the Academic Health Center’s legal counsel, the same counsel that has claimed for all these years nothing was wrong at the U, and that they were Lilly white.
March 8th, 2015 at 5:47PM
well maybe Eli Lilly white…