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 2nd, 2015 at 7:36PM
I don’t think we’ll enact the first proposal as a matter of tax policy; nor do i think we should.
payout being increased in favor of financial aid make sense as something to be pursued via moral suasion.
but the reality is that really qualified poor people already don’t pay to go to elite overfunded schools and are we really arguing for free rides to rich kids just to soak up increased endowment payouts?
harvard should figure out how to deliver very high quality education to a lot more people than come to their campus. the technology is pretty much here. they have the money.
November 2nd, 2015 at 8:02PM
John…”harvard should figure out how to deliver very high quality education to a lot more people than come to their campus. the technology is pretty much here. they have the money.”
A cynic might say that the high value of a Harvard degree stems in significant part from scarcity, and hence, regardless of technology or finances, their incentive is to maintain that scarcity. Think in terms of limited-edition prints.
November 2nd, 2015 at 8:06PM
Years ago, way back in 1969, Peter Drucker wrote:
“One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…”
Over the intervening 46 years, American society has come far closer to accepting “Grand Ecole” status for HLS and similar institutions than was the case when Professor Drucker wrote.
Drucker (himself an Austrian) also wrote:
“It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman.”
November 2nd, 2015 at 8:09PM
I don’t have any strong feelings either way about the proposal (and John makes some good points). My chief reaction to proposals to reform just about anything about the Ivy League, however, is that doing so is analogous to strenuously polishing the figurehead of the Titanic while ignoring the much larger problems elsewhere on the ship. That analogy probably works whether you consider the ship to be the American higher-ed system, or the whole economic/social system.
Also, some of the same arguments might be made about many other well-heeled nonprofit organizations that tend to serve their donor class more than anybody else (long-established high-culture arts organizations of various kinds come to mind). Much as I’d like to see the benefits of such endeavors spread much more widely, I’m not sure we want to go down that road.
It might be better to concentrate on the chief donors and other ways they manage to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
November 3rd, 2015 at 12:58PM
UD shows her extreme naivité once again, by praising right-wing blogger/”journalist” Glenn Reynolds, whose attack on those liberal Ivy League institutions stems from his ire at the pesky liberal professors there pointing out that the tax and budget plans of his preferred Republican presidential candidates don’t even come close to adding up.
Then there’s the praise for the University of Northern Kentucky. Read the article; it’s about a senior thesis two students there wrote on public staircases in Cincinnati. An admirable piece of undergraduate research, sure, but nothing that’s not occurring among bright students everywhere–even in the Ivies.
Finally, there’s that harping on the endowments and the amount spent on undergraduates. How many times is it necessary to reiterate that Ivy League universities do a lot of other things–like carry out world-class scientific research–which costs a lot of money. You can be sure that Reynolds is not about to advocate that the government provide those funds instead.
November 3rd, 2015 at 1:53PM
In the provinces: As my title indicates, I’m aware of where Reynolds is coming from.
November 3rd, 2015 at 4:21PM
“right-wing blogger”?
How about libertarian blogger? I read Instapundit at least as often as I read UD. He has no love lost on crony capitalists, too-big-too-fail banks, or Republican elites.
November 5th, 2015 at 12:22PM
[…] University Diaries also has a post and discussion thread on Glenn’s column. […]