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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
November 4th, 2017 at 3:29PM
I have very mixed feelings on this. The existence of a pile of money somewhere doesn’t alone justify taxing it.
In the case of endowment funds for chairs, the payout to the professor is taxed as income to the professor.
But the uber wealthy universities do at times seem to be building wealth for its own sake rather than for an educational purpose.
November 4th, 2017 at 4:18PM
John: I don’t share the ambivalence. We’re not talking about a pile of money; we’re talking about Kangchenjunga. Whether it’s one individual person hoarding ten billion dollars, or one university hoarding 37 billion, the greed is unconscionable. In a world of obscene inequalities, acquisitiveness this depraved has to be intervened in by decent people/societies, and the only way to truly intervene is through taxation.
November 4th, 2017 at 4:42PM
If the wealth is “hoarded” for no good purpose, I can see it,
In my example, if the income from an endowment is fully paid out to faculty as compensation, what’s the argument for taxing it… that professors are overpaid? I don’t see it.
November 4th, 2017 at 5:02PM
John: No – in the specific case of an endowment directed toward a name chair, for instance, I agree with you.
But then again – ultrarich universities routinely insist that huge gobs of endowment money are directed by donors to specific purposes, so their hands are tied, blah blah. In many cases this is a bogus argument – universities are perfectly able to discuss with donors where they think money might most intelligently be directed, and I’m sure many donors would be happy to be flexible on the matter. And of course even huger gobs of university money are undirected – they’re just plain old unencumbered wealth of which the ultrarich should … unencumber themselves.
November 4th, 2017 at 6:41PM
having worked on campaigns, i’ve always been surprised at how unwilling schools are to suggest to donors that they fund the school’s priorities rather than the donors’.
November 5th, 2017 at 12:09PM
If Harvard, Yale, etc truly believe that they offer superior education…wouldn’t it be their responsibility to use their endowment income to create additional campuses, working on the same principles and with similar faculty, so as to bring the benefits of this superior education to more people?
OTOH, if their objective is to increase the value of their degrees by limiting the supply..like destroying the plates after producing a certain number of prints…they would not want to do any such thing.
November 5th, 2017 at 12:30PM
David: It’s like the evolution of the art market – the most brilliant and valuable canvases and sculptures tend to be locked away in vaults.
November 6th, 2017 at 8:29AM
it would be admirable, for sure. is coercing admirable behavior the job of the tax code?
November 6th, 2017 at 8:44AM
No. The tax code doesn’t know from admirable. It just extracts money for the good of the commonwealth. It doesn’t get angry about things like Harvard’s endowment and the Paradise Papers/Panama Papers. It just tries to get a handle on them.
November 8th, 2017 at 9:13PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/world/universities-offshore-investments.html