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
July 16th, 2015 at 9:47AM
Was there as much off-field violence among college football players in, say, 1960 as there is today? Someone should really research this.
If the answer is “no,” then the cause of today’s violence would seem to lie somewhere other than in the inherent character of the game.
Similarly, it would be interesting to compare rates of off-field violence among players in other high-profile sports, especially basketball, which are less inherently violent.
July 16th, 2015 at 10:12AM
david: I think football AS a game has gotten more violent – significantly more violent – during that time. I think one can trace the same evolution in, say, hockey.
July 16th, 2015 at 10:32AM
not sure what the point would be of waxing philosophical about essences given that the appeal (and of course the money) is in the more/extreme quality of the games and players.
as for professional bball ask someone like Kevin Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ31539Cg04
July 17th, 2015 at 1:43AM
@David, great question. I don’t know how else to compare off field violence between eras without looking at arrest records, and that would be a monumental research project. But, if we were to assume that increased priority of football for universities has led to recruiting more violent players, then maybe we can look at how many more games are played now than in 1960.
1960: 603 games played, by 113 teams and 9 bowl games.
2013: 849 games played by 124 teams and 35 bowl games.
Sources; Wikipedia and College Football at Sports-Reference.com
Can far greater money for broadcasting rights be the incentive for teams to overlook character issues while recruiting? Quite likely. Has the game become more violent? That may not be so apparent, it’s still about blocking and tackling, and whoever is more adept at both is going to win more often than not, whether it’s 1960 or 2013. And you have to be pretty savage to be adept at both. But, what can be said, is that a inherently violent game is being played far more often, for a hell of a lot more money, than ever before. Because there are 26 more bowl games than in 1960, 52 more teams have far longer seasons than 55 years ago. I would have to say, given what’s at stake, coaches want the players who can inflict a lot of pain for an extended period of time.