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
January 9th, 2016 at 8:57PM
Actually, there would be an easy solution for Harvard. Raise the sticker price of tuition to $100K/year or higher. Scale up financial aid accordingly. Then reimburse yourself $500M from the endowment for relief of general funds in the operating budget. The very wealthy who are above the financial aid ceiling will still pay for the prestige. The income ceiling for financial aid would go up commensurately, and just about everyone would get a discount. For family incomes up to about $130K, Harvard could probably offer a free ride. You’d have to adjust the spending rate on the endowment, and the money managers wouldn’t be comfortable with this, but since money is fungible and such a large part of Harvard’s operating budget is coming from endowment earnings anyway, this would probably be smoothed out in the long term as the money flows were shifted around. This may be simplistic, but I’d predict that some variant of this approach would be the result if a regulation like this were to come into effect. Good intentions almost always result in tuition going up, never down.
January 10th, 2016 at 1:19AM
Polish Peter: Just jack up the tuition! I hadn’t thought of that. Simple, elegant.
January 10th, 2016 at 8:05AM
I’m not necessarily a friend of Harvard, but it already does something very close to your financial aid proposal. If your family income is below 150K, the max they ask you to pay is 10% of your income:
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works
January 10th, 2016 at 6:21PM
Yep, they’d raise the tuition.
A clever lawmaker would write in a restriction on how much tuition could go up a year (yeah, yeah, there’d be ways around that – they could charge more for food!) – but what about REWARDING Ivies that use their endowments to pay the tuition for students at state universities? How about a Harvard Foundation Scholarship at one of the UMass campuses?
January 10th, 2016 at 11:13PM
This proposal would, in effect, give more money to well-off people. This is of course the basic program of at least one of our great political parties; I am nonetheless constantly surprised by the broad appeal of such pseudo-populism.
January 11th, 2016 at 9:15AM
Mr Punch: I see it as Step One on the road to Harvard’s well-deserved loss of its tax exemption.
January 11th, 2016 at 2:41PM
Michael: The problem with any charitable options is that this would threaten the “rainy day” narrative Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have been putting out for so long: Sure, it looks like a lot of money, but it’s a rainy day fund. You never know when you’re going to need an extra ten billion.