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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
August 27th, 2015 at 11:30AM
The best part of this song is Newman’s redneck narrator describing Dick Cavett, WASP from Nebraska, as a “smart-ass, New York Jew.”
There are layers and layers to unpack in that clever nod to Southern attitudes on the national media in the 1970s. The entire album is an excellent satire of the cultural baggage that made Nixon’s Southern Strategy so successful. The palpable anger that fueled George Wallace, massive resistance, and conservative backlash. Then again, that the album and the foibles it highlighted were embraced by progressive Southerners does speak to change in the region that decade — Newman premiered the thing with the Atlanta symphony in 1974. Journalist Steven Hart has a nice essay on the conceptualization of the album in his volume LET THE DEVIL SPEAK.
“Louisiana, 1927” is remarkably powerful in the right circumstances. Ten years after Katrina, the tune has been re-purposed as a de facto anthem for the tangled cultural responses to the Hurricane — “Six feet of water in the streets of Plaquemine.” One of those resilient cultural artifacts written about one thing but spontaneously and successfully embraced as the ideal distillation of another. Like the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth,” penned three or four years before the Kent State shootings but now forever linked to the incident by subsequent cultural memory.
Still think the most compelling things on that album are “Mr. President, Have Pity on the Working Man” and the three Huey Long songs. Back in college I seriously toyed with applying to direct Robert Penn Warren’s stage adaptation of ALL THE KING’s MEN in an experimental black box theater using this album as a musical base. There’s such a quiet menace to “Kingfish.”
Hailing from Alabama, I find a certain poignancy in the track “Birmingham.” The juxtaposition of backyard trees and submerged violence (“Get ’em, Dan!” referring to “Bull” Connor). Though I lived two hours away, my hometown was in the Birmingham media market, so we used to get news and ads for Jefferson County elections. I recall one of the candidates in the contentious 1999 Birmingham mayoral race (maybe William Bell?) briefly sampled the chorus in commercials. I wonder if whoever on his campaign licensed the song had ever listened to the thing the whole way through.
The Cherokee County mentioned in the wedding song on the album is just north of where I grew up. Site of the terrible Palm Sunday tornado that made national news twenty years ago for flattening a church during a service, killing twenty parishioners.
The county seat is named Centre; the locals joke the town’s unofficial motto is “Far From the.”
You can tell I come from the Southern narrative tradition Newman himself channels — I ramble and meander.
August 27th, 2015 at 1:47PM
Thanks for this, Crimson05er. I’ve always loved this album, and now I love it even more.