1. The importance of going to college.
[Derek Black] decided he wanted to study medieval European history, so he applied to New College of Florida, a top-ranked liberal arts school with a strong history program.
2. The importance of simple, unafraid compassion.
Matthew decided his best chance to affect Derek’s thinking was not to ignore him or confront him, but simply to include him.
Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=53635
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
October 25th, 2016 at 6:54PM
I agree. But I think that a third important factor was the remark that the young Derek, despite his racist beliefs, liked most people that he met, regardless of who they were.
October 25th, 2016 at 7:12PM
I think that point two is exactly right as generalized.
Point one can be generalized more as the importance of people spending time with those different from themselves in settings as conducive as possible to developing an understanding of the world around them, including an understanding each other. My experiences in public primary and secondary schools and in the Army are examples of such settings. Brown v. Board did a great deal along these lines. Home schooling and, in some cases homogeneous schools, trouble me as stunting a child in ways for which severe sensory deprivation might be a metaphor. And, of course, higher education allows knowledge of others and their contexts to deepen. The great difficulty is reconciling society’s interest in this sort of socialization, education and development with parents rights and interests, understood sensitively, and with those of the child as s/he develops into a person with autonomous interests and perspectives.