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
August 7th, 2017 at 3:02AM
A sad corner of the earth. Glad to read that you found it.
August 7th, 2017 at 4:19AM
Yes. Part Two coming up, in which I thank you for helping me perform my little ceremony.
August 7th, 2017 at 8:38AM
San Francisco banned burials after 1901, claiming that cemeteries were a health hazard. What they had become were profit centers for real estate developers. Eventually, nearly all of them were shutdown and for the better part of 40 years, San Francisco evicted corpses, mainly to the city of Colma, which had been created as San Francisco’s graveyard.
My great great grandpa was from San Francisco. He abandoned his family, became a drunk, and was murdered somewhere in the Barbary Coast. They didn’t have the money for proper burial, an Irish charity stepped in, had a funeral mass said, and he was interred in a pauper’s field plot. When he became part of the silent exodus, no one knew, no one was told, they didn’t bother to maintain records for people like him.
My mom and uncle went to look for him decades later. They came to find out that particular section of the cemetery had been disinterred between 29-30. The bodies had been moved to Colma. When they found the location where he supposedly had been taken, it was at the end of a gravel road at the back of a massive graveyard. It was large dirt hill, a few sporadic patches of grass attempting to hold the thing together. A few headstones dotted the site, and if you climbed to the top, you could see The Bay.
Not long before she died, I took her and my dad back to the place. They recited the Rosary, asked a catholic god to allow the perpetual light to shine on him, and left….
August 7th, 2017 at 8:58AM
charlie: An amazing and moving story.
My own angle on some of this is that (at least if you’re at all like me) we’re so scared and in denial when it comes to death that we don’t much take into account (unless we live long enough to get very obviously old and infirm and one-foot-in-the-grave) the need for ourselves to be dealt with qua physical and spiritual body in some way when we die. (Related phenomena: Not getting around to doing your will and power of attorney.) Whether we’re a lost soul (like your great great grandfather) or just an ordinary schmoe, many of us float along not thinking about any of this. The consequences turn out in a lot of cases to matter – to the people we left behind.
And I had NO IDEA about the fascinating history of SF and cemeteries. I’m reading more about it now.
August 7th, 2017 at 11:54AM
I have very explicit written directions, UD.
1) Straight into the ground.
2) Don’t you dare interrupt the “straight into the ground” part with a detour into a wake, funeral, life celebration, or any other bullshit like that.
August 7th, 2017 at 12:04PM
tp: I hear you. Quick silent ash scattering is something similar. But a bit of “ceremony” or “ritual” clings to this, whereas dig/place/cover is as pure as it gets I guess.