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
July 22nd, 2016 at 1:36PM
just like preachers driving oversized luxury cars it signals being tapped into the Source of all goodies
July 22nd, 2016 at 3:55PM
RIP
July 22nd, 2016 at 4:50PM
Rolls Royces reflect a British Commonwealth influence. Our local preacher folk grandees usually settle for Cadillacs.
July 22nd, 2016 at 6:30PM
while its certainly arguable that donating to harvard is suboptimal, it’s hardly “unconscionable”.
July 22nd, 2016 at 7:37PM
john: I’d argue that donating vast sums to Harvard is indeed unconscionable.
July 22nd, 2016 at 8:18PM
The sentiment is accurate, but comparing the dollar value of a university’s endowment with a country’s GDP, which is measured in dollars per year, makes an article (or podcast episode?) sound dumb. It’s like saying, “that suburb is further away than the speed limit.”
Malcolm Gladwell, with all his magazine and book editors, must know better. I hope that’s just a bad summary by the Huffington Post author.
July 22nd, 2016 at 9:54PM
i think the better argument is with what harvard does (and does not do) with its endowment.
July 22nd, 2016 at 11:36PM
Dom: It’s a very popular comparison nonetheless – one of many prior examples:
http://www.boston.com/news/business/2014/09/25/harvards-endowment-is-bigger-than-half-the-worlds-economies
July 23rd, 2016 at 12:26AM
The headline at that link, “Harvard’s Endowment Is Bigger Than Half the World’s Economies,” moves the quantity-to-rate comparison from dumb to outright wrong.
Writing “your car is fifteen times faster than you are tall” is dumb. Turning that into “your sedan is taller than you” makes it completely wrong—I know I can see over the roof!—and undermines everything else the author is saying.
Harvard was founded in 1636. Divide its endowment by its age, and you get a (still completely meaningless) number smaller than every country’s GDP in the linked table except Tuvalu. And Harvard employs more people than Tuvalu’s population.
No quibbles with the actual moral argument, but the frequent comparisons to GDP grate like an eloguent proffessor of oraltory who cant spell.
July 24th, 2016 at 1:58AM
I’m a Williams alum, and our endowment is, by liberal arts college standards, an insanely high $1.3 billion (give or take a hundred million). But not so insanely high that it seems quite as unconscionable to do targeted donations every year.
But in 2008-10 or so I was really annoyed when the college tightened its belt. It seemed to me at the time that it was precisely the right time, when everyone else was cutting back, to make a big hiring push at a time when the market would have been unbelievably fruitful to pick up the best of the best potential faculty. Not that Williams doesn’t do very well, but being countercyclical could have produced the best new faculty crop in years even given that the new faculty crop at Williams (or Amherst, or Swarthmore, or what have you — I think the same idea applies across the board) is always fantastic. My argument was that you could do that without denting the endowment in any meaningful way, and set the college up to thrive even more than usual when the recovery happened.
Not shockingly, my modest annual donation didn’t give my voice much credence.
July 25th, 2016 at 6:10AM
Stocks versus flows – that a fallacy is widespread doesn’t justify it. I can’t help but notice that UD’s household appears to own millions of dollars worth of real estate, while poor Professor VE in the next office is barely earning six figures.
July 25th, 2016 at 9:21AM
UD, Harvard, like many institutions, draws down its endowment by 5% or so annually. That is hardly “hoarding.”
July 25th, 2016 at 9:37AM
tp: You’re a significantly publicly funded institution operating for the public good and you spend barely five percent of your 36.5 BILLION dollar endowment per year?
And remember: “[W]hen it comes to these fancy universities the official endowment figures are a drastic understatement of the real wealth of the university. Harvard’s real-estate assets are mind-bogglingly valuable, for example, but not part of the endowment.”
July 26th, 2016 at 12:19PM
In an age where interest rates on 30 year treasury bonds are about 2% and AAA corporate bonds are 3%, a 5% payout is entirely reasonable. Harvard has operating income of $4.5 billion, of which fully 35% is endowment draw.
Understand that I hold no brief for Harvard, but I don’t think that they should be required to act recklessly.