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 11th, 2016 at 4:38PM
UD, without doubt, the bulk of this nonsense is primarily the fault of admins/BOT. But their customers are FAR from a discerning lot.
https://youtu.be/g2QJ8F2QwVU
If students want the I’m Schmacked producers to feature their school, they have to prove they’re fully capable of being a Top 20 laid, loaded and drunk institution. Admins have no problem with the Utube series because it’s an outstanding advertising tool. The reason I featured San Diego State is that more than a few of my Oregon hs students knew of SDSU’s party reputation and were willing to pay nearly 3x more tuition to attend a CA public uni unremarkable for academic rigor.
I’m not a blue nosed biddie intent on maintaining my notion of behavior. I wasn’t much different than any of these kids. But my generation knew you didn’t need to take on massive, unmitigated debt in order to become a demigod of debauchery. Find a job, move in with friends, get faded as much as you want, with no loans. Thing is, unis cannot promote outstanding scholarship in order to attract the bulk of their undergrads. All that’s left is the current strategy of demanding little to no hard academic work in order to facilitate what is featured in the vid. And if any 20 year old is too jacked up to understand how they’re being scammed, then it’s not too difficult to understand why they would celebrate emotionally unstable athletes adorning their campuses. This is what they wanted, and this is what they’re getting….
January 11th, 2016 at 4:42PM
Here is part of the issue, UD — at the very upper echelons these football programs are effectively private endeavors. I suppose technically any money that comes into the University of Texas football program, say, is kinda sorta technically “public,” but it is such its own entity that it neither uses nor needs state resources as we commonly understand them. The same is the case for Alabama and a handful of others. So that leaves other schools scrambling to compete in a context within which they DO need those state resources, those student fees, those publicly funded stadia. Texas A&M almost surely uses minimal to no state money, and so forth. In other words, at the very upper end these places are so disconnected from the universities to which they are supposedly attached that they really might as well just go private. It’s maddening, but also seems unlikely to change, even if Clemson’s students saying “thanks but no thanks” to an athletics fee — and having the AD recognize it — was a modest coup for the good guys.
dcat
January 11th, 2016 at 5:02PM
but Derek ask yourself where does this necessity/imperative to keep up with the evil empires come from?
the sad truth is that too many of the land-grant schools strayed from their founding missions and quickly turned into diploma mills, part of the why can’t we have nice things phenomena with public goods in the US, just look what they are fighting to do with national park lands out west…
January 11th, 2016 at 5:55PM
http://www.omaha.com/huskers/blogs/the-husker-football-team-is-worth-how-much-a-whole/article_4455eb96-b8a3-11e5-bcb1-139c08bf66c2.html
January 11th, 2016 at 6:18PM
dmf — I’m not agreeing with the arms race, just recognizing that it exists.
January 13th, 2016 at 8:19PM
Of course, you have to wonder whether any of these almost private football teams would actually be making money if they had to pay their players, could not get tax deductible donations, take advantage of subsidized loans, free ride on other university departments, etc…