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
September 24th, 2018 at 7:45AM
I recall, UD, that UVA Jackie’s fantasy gang-rape rang true to you too. Now that Blasey’s fairy tale has just about collapsed completely, another had to be invented. As, I suppose, Hillary would say, “Haven Monahan…Brett Kavanaugh…what difference does it make?”
September 24th, 2018 at 8:39AM
tp: You’re absolutely right. I also fell for early versions of the Duke lacrosse story. But this post is I hope very careful in not rushing to judgment.
September 24th, 2018 at 10:59AM
What fascinates me is the long-standing construct of the “prep school” as a kind of unique bastion of depravity. I went to a Catholic all-boy high school with “prep” in its name, no less, and at every reunion, there are boastful recollections of what hell-raisers we were, what sodden drunks, what aggressive skirt-chasers, etc., etc. The reality is that we were mildly rowdy and occasionally obnoxious, but a policeman would laugh out loud at the idea we caused any serious trouble. The contemporary criminal records of a single class at any of the local public schools back then would exceed 10+ years of anything that went on at our place.
September 24th, 2018 at 11:34AM
tp: Not so much unique bastions, but — I think the fact of their being self-identified as very religious, as places you go out of your way to send your kid to because he will get a higher level of spiritual/ethical training, makes them particularly susceptible to the charge of hypocrisy.
For instance, my sense is that the deeply dedicated drinking culture of a school like G’town Prep blows away most public school competitors — mainly because public schools, like Walter Johnson High in Bethesda (which I attended), are full of many different sorts of people and offer no particular dominant cultural way of being. G’town Prep, though — I doubt there’s much wiggle room if you maybe would rather NOT be a lush. I suspect the price of being a sober-deviant at such a school is very high.
When these prep school drunks replicate their G’town experience on the – for instance – Duke lacrosse team, really bad things start to happen (see last paragraph).
September 25th, 2018 at 8:59AM
In what world has “Blasey’s” (I assume we mean Ford’s — is getting her name right THAT hard?) case “fallen apart”? It seems as if someone here has decided the doppelganger theory wasn’t COMPLETELY fucking insane even though it’s completely fucking insane. Of course now we’re hearing that he is going to unleash his diaries to prove his innocence (the 17 year old apparently kept diaries in the summer and has kept them ever since. That “Didn’t commit rape today!” entry will finally come in handy!) Or is it the latest one I’ve seen floating around: He was a virgin until he was 25 so he could not be a rapist!
September 25th, 2018 at 9:19AM
dcat: Late night comedians have been merciless about the calendar (see S. Colbert). And no – nothing’s falling apart here.
September 25th, 2018 at 11:45AM
Sigh. Blasey goes by her maiden name professionally. Check the faculty directory at Palo Alto U. and her published articles, dcat. Is getting her professional name correct REALLY that hard?
September 25th, 2018 at 2:10PM
Snark deserves snark, professor. Touche.
But, to substance — how is the case falling apart, [a]professor? You assert that it was because of thedoppelganger. Do you not recognize that it was stupid to assert that the case was falling apart because of that absurd argument?
Sexual violence apologists are gonna apologize, I guess. And white dudes are gonna assume women’s stories of sexual assault are “fairy tales,” I guess. Sigh, indeed.
September 25th, 2018 at 5:29PM
Just to make the rubble bounce. Letter dated 7/30/2018, sent to Dianne “Dirty Di” Feinstein. Signed by “Christine Blasey.” The Blasey Ford thing seems to have been dreamed up by some media advisor, probably to allay the suspicions of the still- sizable segment of American womanhood that thinks married women should take the husband’s name.
Zero corroborating witnesses; blanket denials by people she claims were there. Zero refinement of the month, day, and time. Can’t say anything specific about where, except maybe near a country club. Can’t explain why she would even be there, given that this was supposedly not a big party, but a “gathering” and the boys there not part of her normal social circle. Therapist took bad notes a few years ago–here let me fix them, with help of wholly disinterested hub. Numbers of attendees change. Can’t remember how she got there or got home. Bff denies having been at party or knowing BK, so no ride from that quarter. Blasey does’t remember walking miles home, calling her parents, etc? Give me a break.
The reality, dcat, is that affluent prep girls like Blasey have moms and other family members who took tons of photographs to document family activities of all sorts. Ditto for BK. It would not be difficult to sit down with some relatives and go through family photos to build a rough timeline of where she was and what she was doing that summer. This isn’t hard, once you start doing it. I can tell you where I was and doing what in general every single summer during high school and college within the range of three weeks or so, without looking at any documentation. If I sat down with the family photos, and talked with my sibs, I could easily get the high school summers refined down to less than ten days and probably less than that. The “mystery summer” is a total crock for someone from a family like hers.
The reason that she and her handlers wanted the “FBI investigation” was not to find witnesses, but to get hold of a BK timeline for that summer, so that they could come up with a more specific day and/or time of day. If she says June, and it turns out that BK and fam spent the whole month visiting Aunt Polly and Uncle Tom away from their home, it’s game over. If she says it was a weekday afternoon in July, and it turns out that BK had 2-a-day practices every weekday, it’s game over.