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
March 15th, 2018 at 5:00PM
I’ve been reading the WSJ coverage for awhile. I don’t think there’s a LOT of room to assume she’s not a Bernie. Or if she isn’t, she pretended to be a lot smarter than she is.
March 15th, 2018 at 6:34PM
Michael: Hm. I haven’t read as extensively as you, but one thing I picked up on is that she never paid herself much of anything… But maybe this isn’t the whole story.
March 16th, 2018 at 7:53AM
I doubt that it was a total scam, in the sense of the founder hyping a technology that she knew wouldn’t work. More likely, it started as “it’s going to take a while to make it work right, meanwhile, we’ve got to stretch the truth a little to keep the company alive”…and moved on to greater and greater levels of deception. It seems also that the Board members she had chosen were mostly there for their PR value rather than for their knowledge of relevant technologies/industries or even of startup businesses in general, and that some of them–George Schultz in particular, it appears–weren’t interested in hearing bad news.
But if the WSJ article is correct, this case went beyond financial fraud and may well have put patients at risk. If this is the case, I would put it in the category of knowingly selling bad aircraft engine parts.
Which reminds me…I vaguely recall reading Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons”, which centers around a company selling bad cylinder heads, under the pressure of WWII military aircraft production. Perhaps some parallels.
March 16th, 2018 at 7:57AM
David: I think you probably have it just right. Though that doesn’t mean she doesn’t belong in jail for awhile.
March 16th, 2018 at 8:08AM
I suspect a high % of financial fraud cases, including some at quite-large corporations, have these dynamics. But “I did it to save the company and everybody’s job and investment” can’t be allowed to be an excuse, any more than “I did all these holdups so my family could stay in a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood” can be an excuse for armed robbery.
The putting of patients at risk, if shown to be true, is an even more serious matter, which ‘m pretty confident carries criminal penalties on its own.
March 19th, 2018 at 8:20AM
There was a narrative here that people wanted a piece of. Young, plucky, progressive woman beats the boys with inventions that are almost ready for prime time. Like Bill G., and Steve J., and Mark Z., she dropped out of college rather than continue to bridle her brilliance. Along with that white lab coat, what greater credential is there? She herself fervently believes in her own genius and leadership and knows in her heart of hearts that with just a little more money and time, her company will revolutionize, democratize, and JustAboutAnythingElseFuzzy-ize the industry. For the investors, this is not some boring bullshit industry that makes aluminum cans, light bulbs, sweat pants, etc., where we put on our green eyeshades and worry about expenses and margins and market share and actual product. This is the future, and we better get in on the ground floor. It’s an old story on Wall Street. In any event, the fund managers say, if it goes south, hey, we bought ourselves some diversity insurance for when Sister Mary Indignant of the Sisters of Perpetual Outrage uses her order’s one share at the annual meeting to demand to know how we are supporting social justice.
Fortunately for Elizabeth, since she is photogenic, plucky, confident, sincere, supporting the right progressive causes and candidates, etc., etc., we won’t come down hard on her, unlike the odious Shkreli, even though her fraud was 10X bigger. She and Marissa Mayer can collaborate on a book about how the patriarchy undermined their leadership. $29.95, coming soon to the remainder table at your local bookstore. Both available at $5-10K/throw to talk to your biz school about the wicked treatment of women entrepreneurs by Wall Street.
March 19th, 2018 at 9:13AM
tp: Your cynicism could power New York City, but here I agree with most of what you say. It’s absurd that she might not like Shkreli suffer jail time … though she might, so let’s hold off on that one. A tiny portion of the contempt the world has for Shkreli might not be a bad thing either.
March 19th, 2018 at 3:51PM
I plead guilty to the cynicism charge, but I’m hoping for no jail time.