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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
March 8th, 2019 at 8:53PM
An LOL for this horrific incident? I had Kaiser medical for a couple of years. Unfortunately, their brand of garbage MBA medicine is the future. Expect their consent forms to have this kind of savagery written into the fine print.
March 8th, 2019 at 9:05PM
Ravi: Yes. LOL. It’s not horrific or savage; it’s postmodern.
March 9th, 2019 at 1:57AM
I come to your land from the physical sciences and don’t fully speak the language. Can you share your definition of ‘postmodern’? I keep looking it up every time I see it and I get something different every time.
March 9th, 2019 at 5:34AM
Ravi: Like “modern” and “modernist,” postmodern and postmodernist can indeed be made to mean a lot of things. But I’m using it here in the following restricted sense, rather in line with the category I chose for this post: Where the simulacrum ends..
While “modern” is often used to designate the visible tactile technology of the industrial era (smoke stacks, turbines, captured in the photography for example of Margaret Bourke-White), postmodern designates the invisible, screen-based technology that comes after this, in the later 20th and now 21st century. It describes the “Blade Runner” world of post-human, often robot-centered and/or screen-centered technology.
Robo-doc is – to me – one absurdly comic culmination of this general trend toward the replacement of human life, human presence, human interaction, by robots and screens — the replacement of the real by the simulacral, the projected image rather than the immediate presence.
That this technology presents itself not as dystopic (as in the film and as in most pomo films – see for a more recent example the adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis) but rather as efficient and normal — I mean, the image of that robot trundling into that hospital room! – is a further iteration, a further normalization, of omnipresent screen technology.
March 9th, 2019 at 12:58PM
I appreciate the definition and think that I now understand your ‘LOL’ a little better, if not completely. Unfortunately, I don’t see Robo-doc as a culmination but just another step downstairs. The screens are only at the interface and any role they play in communication is minor compared to their role as collectors. The bits go into a network which has taken on a life of its own. There’s no way to know let alone understand what’s happening in there since it takes equally powerful computing to navigate it. Robots will supplant humans in the near-term but I wonder what will happen when even they aren’t needed any longer.
You’re also right that Robodoc is no longer dystopic. It is being flogged by my employer and the few health plans it still offers as a way to better care, lower premiums and, more subtly, a way for us to be better employees by reducing corporate’s expenses. Kaiser is at the forefront of this. They recently opened a storefront in my neighborhood with some human presence and a lot of screens for video consultations.
While I don’t look forward to future medicine, I do like the idea of virtual travel. It’d be nice to have someone carry a high-def camera where I’d like and beam it all back into a headset. The Swiss have done a nice job of this with a virtual walking tour from Thusis to Tirano: http://www.webwandern.ch/en/stages/