… a school superintendent whose self-published book has significant plagiarism, and includes sentences like “The flow of hot unpretentious lava with many fingers,” that’s their business.
… a school superintendent whose self-published book has significant plagiarism, and includes sentences like “The flow of hot unpretentious lava with many fingers,” that’s their business.
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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
May 19th, 2016 at 9:18AM
The school superintendent in question has a Ph.d in Educational Research and Evaluation from University of Miami. You would think that somewhere along the way he would have learned something about citations. And his field of study was Educational Research. Irony so greasy it sticks to your hands and fails to flow like hot unpretentious lava with many fingers…
May 19th, 2016 at 12:25PM
At my university, the geniuses in the business department hired an Ed.D. who claimed something like 150 publications. Quite the scholar! But as it turned out (I checked), none of these “publications” were academic journal articles; most appeared to be short, inane posts written for an obscure business blog.
This guy also claimed to have written three books, but try as I might I could dig up no trace of these books anywhere. This digging did, however, turn up lots of newspaper articles detailing his stormy (and short) tenure as a public school superintendent.
I have no idea whether the search committee was oblivious to all this stuff, or knew about it and didn’t care. Probably the former. Either way, not only did the committee hire (let’s call him) Dr. Faker, they hired him *with tenure* specifically to chair their department.
Why was I, an English prof, checking up on Dr. Faker? He’s tall and handome, silver-haired and silver-tongued, the type who gets away with a lot on charm alone and to which I have an instinctive antipathy. I sensed he was a phony the moment I met him, which means I also sensed an opportunity to get some dirt on a potential rival. I suppose I should be ashamed to admit this, but as a department chair, which at my institution basically means “competitor for scarce resources,” I enjoyed playing dirty, and Step 1 in playing dirty is to dig up dirt.
Now that I’m retired, all that Richard III stuff is behind me. But I was pleased to learn that Dr. Faker was recently canned as chair and is now teaching Intro to Business classes.
May 19th, 2016 at 1:28PM
Dr. Docterstein, so that guy was hired, in part, because of the short, inane posts on an obscure blog. Hell, I should round up all of my UD posts and become Chancellor….
May 20th, 2016 at 7:41AM
Dr_, thanks. Ed. D teaching business? Around 2002 a librarian (MLS degree, I guess) at our Podunk Tech told me she’d been approached to teach a business course. “I don’t know anything about business”, she said. She was upset because she turned down the offer. I shoulda learned something from that . . . I shoulda.
I recall years ago seeing a title, “lay professor”, in one of those education ads in the NYT. I don’t any more about it, but I’ll guess it may mean a citizen-scholar who’s cultivated unusual expertise, and has some teaching chops, despite a lack of credentials, pubs, etc. Don’t know if it’s a good idea.
I scanned the links to the Enchilada County guy. Yeah, looking a bit windy.
May 20th, 2016 at 9:18AM
“But as it turned out (I checked), none of these “publications” were academic journal articles; most appeared to be short, inane posts written for an obscure business blog.”
I suspect that a significant % of posts of LinkedIn are written for similar purposes…
May 20th, 2016 at 11:57AM
Dr_Doctorstein, is your B-school accredited by AACSB? They are living dangerously if they think they can get away with that, unless this guy is some kind of “executive in residence” with a real business background.
I was on a search committee for another department’s chair some time ago. There was a candidate with an 8-page CV with dozens of publications listed. With the exception of one chapter in a book, they were all op-eds or columns in his local newspaper, most having nothing to do with his nominal expertise.
May 20th, 2016 at 12:18PM
Theprofessor, you might well be right re accreditation, since Dr. Faker’s demotion coincides with the end of the university’s accreditation visits. Whether the site team discovered the fakery on their own or were tipped off about it, I couldn’t say.