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 19th, 2017 at 7:20PM
As for ugly identity politics – hey. Better ugly identities than no identity at all.
That’s a cute line (truly), but you’re being disingenuous, if you’re pretending that all the backers of these laws are sincerely concerned about women’s civil rights.
October 19th, 2017 at 9:21PM
Alan: I think a reasonable number of people who back these laws do so for reasons that have something to do with the liberation of women; but I think many reasons converge in many people’s minds, and not all of the reasons are pretty. I think in places like France there’s a whole set of reasons that have to do with secularity and with civic life. Some people have security concerns, and I think it’s reasonable to have security concerns about people who refuse under any conditions to reveal their faces (even in a court of law). No doubt some of the people who want to ban burqas are xenophobes/islamophobes. And some cynically think it will help their political party or whatever. It’s a complex issue with many layers of motivation producing the result of overwhelming opposition in most countries where polling is done.
But the reason I concentrate on countries like Denmark is that it’s rather hard to think of the Danes as bigoted types; yet the country has passed a popular burqa ban. Nor do I think the European Court of Human Rights a bunch of bigots. Yet they have unanimously supported Belgium’s ban.
October 20th, 2017 at 8:27AM
I honestly don’t know what I think about burqa bans. I don’t like burqas, but I also don’t like the state telling private citizens what they can and cannot do in their private lives, even if one accepts (as I do) that it’s not simply a matter of individual choice here, and that coercive community/familial pressures may be involved.
But whenever there’s a great deal of enthusiasm for laws which don’t really seem to have any compelling public urgency, given the small number of incidents involved, AND when that enthusiasm seems to be bubbling up particularly in societies which have nasty histories of xenophobia (Austria, Quebec) – well, don’t try telling me that’s irrelevant, because there’s clearly more going on here.
October 20th, 2017 at 8:32AM
Also, let’s not romanticize Danish liberalism. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/world/europe/denmark-migrants-refugees-racism.html
October 20th, 2017 at 10:03AM
Alan: I’d take issue with “no compelling public urgency” as well as “coercive community pressures may be involved.”
Once it’s established that life for women in places that are supposed to be advanced relative to the rest of their part of the world (see the latest news out of Egypt) is hellish (at least 90% of Egyptian female babies and children have their clitorises slashed off — completely because of community coercion coming from religious authorities), it’s pretty hard to argue that cultures who cherish and promote women, who regard them as autonomous and equal in every way, should not feel threatened by the woman-hating world that things like the burqa (and child marriage and polygamy) so powerfully represent.
I think democratic cultures are right to feel urgency about the anti-assimilating, anti-democratic, and demoralizing effects (demoralizing in particular for young women in one’s country who will want to know why women and women alone on the streets of their city are annihilating themselves; and why some of those women, told to remove their face veil, will explain that their husbands won’t let them and their daughters out of the house unless their face is covered) of the burqa.
The European Court of Human Rights correctly and unanimously noted that all countries have the right to protect their women from reactionary, coercive, hateful, and deeply unequal conditions. The burqa, which has no religious grounding, powerfully conveys these conditions.
I’m sure there are burqa wearers in Europe who will protest that they love living under total body coverage, and they’re thrilled to see their eleven year old daughters living that way too. Who can’t say enough about no peripheral vision, breathing hard against cloth, never feeling the sun, and experiencing difficulty with every movement.
Perhaps those among them who’ve undergone FGM are relieved for themselves and their daughters not to have to experience sexual pleasure also. Right here in the United States we have Hopkins trained doctors like Jumala Nagarwala who has reportedly mutilated hundreds of our fellow citizens (all of them girls around the age of seven).
I don’t know what to say about people who regard these things as goods, Alan. About people who pay people like Nagarwala a lot of money to do this to their children. The intensity of community coercion can only be imagined, given this vicious and perverse behavior.
But here’s what I can say. You simply can’t bring all of that to free societies without expecting a fight. And without expecting the courts of those societies to rule on behalf of freedom.
You will say I’m wandering too far afield in this comment. I am not. The virginity-obsessed, violently woman-hating world that has produced the grotesquerie of the burqa is a world, against which we have a right, with the help of the courts, to defend democracy.
October 20th, 2017 at 11:17AM
I don’t think you’re talking too far afield.
I do think, however, that there’s a lot to this issue that you don’t really want to talk about, and I think you’d have more credibility if you were willing to talk about it. Motives matter. Context matters.
October 20th, 2017 at 11:49AM
Alan: Tell me what I’ve not talked about (not wanted to talk about) and I’ll talk about it. UD
October 20th, 2017 at 12:26PM
Well, there’s the curious fact that many of the Europeans who seem most enthusiastic about a burqa ban are not people who have hitherto demonstrated any great sense of urgency about women’s rights more generally. The German AfD’s youth wing recently got itself into quite a bit of hot water by extolling the virtues of good ol’ Kinder, Küche, Kirche gender relations a bit too obviously. Strange that its members should get into such a lather about the identiy problems of Muslim women. Could there be anything, oh, I don’t know, *different* about the burqa issue?
October 20th, 2017 at 12:44PM
Alan: For sure. Let me think about that one for awhile and I’ll post something about it.
October 20th, 2017 at 1:14PM
Appreciate that, UD. I don’t doubt your own sincerity, by the way. There’s a liberal argument for a burqa ban. It’s one that in some ways I’m drawn to myself. The problem is that there’s also an illiberal argument for it, and it’s the illiberal argument that seems to be really propelling most of what’s going on right now.