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
April 8th, 2019 at 10:36PM
This will be another interesting wedge issue in 2020.
April 8th, 2019 at 10:51PM
Ravi: A very tricky one – I’m thinking most pols will stay away from it. First because it’s hard to get regular folks really to take in issues like overuse of antibiotics and anti-vax stuff. People understand opioids because they see addiction and overdose firsthand, and because it’s easy to grasp the sordid behavior of pharma in the matter. But disease from drug-resistant illness and from non-vaccination remains abstract to most people. And I’m afraid what remains concrete – I remember this from vaccinating my own kid – is the actually kind of scary needle-full of stuff you’re asked to put in your kid – more than once – at a very young age. That’s really graphic.
April 8th, 2019 at 11:33PM
I am thinking of it as a pure emotional play: Evil gurvmint vs. People of Faith (r)(c)(tm). Worked a treat in 2016 and now extending beyond the Christian base.
April 9th, 2019 at 1:19AM
According to an ABC report in January of this year, those that opt out of vaccinations are the more affluent and better educated. Growing portion of the top 10% distrust vaccine efficacy….
April 9th, 2019 at 10:53AM
“According to an ABC report in January of this year, those that opt out of vaccinations are the more affluent and better educated.”
My sense is that these people are mostly those who believe in such things as magical crystals, homeopathy, the evils of GMO, etc. They will often describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”
April 9th, 2019 at 12:38PM
Anti-vaxxers draw from both the whackadoodle left and rightwing nutjobs. It’s not just the religious/spiritual, but also anti government, anti establishment blah blah types. Unless they’re in very safe seats, politicians won’t touch the issue because they’re bound to offend at least some of their base no matter what they say.
April 9th, 2019 at 2:45PM
Anon, please. Yours is a puerile characterization of a growing number of people who don’t agree with the efficacy of vaccines. Whatever you may think, they have access to alternative information. Dispute that, and leave name calling in the playground….
April 9th, 2019 at 4:22PM
Anon: That’s an important point – the teenager interviewed by S. Bee (he also testified before Congress) seems to have as a mother a new age type, and they’re definitely over-represented among the anti-vaxx people.
The short clip Bee provides in her piece – an interview with a seemingly highly educated woman who simply chooses not to believe in the germ theory of disease — speaking of medieval — is the most disheartening thing in her report.
April 9th, 2019 at 10:12PM
Y’all heard of Alton Ochsner?
April 10th, 2019 at 5:43PM
I guess not. Dr. Ochsner was a renowned New Orleans surgeon working out of Tulane University. In the mid 50s, the Salk polio vaccine had been developed. Then, as now, questions were raised as to its safety. Ochsner was a proponent of wide spread innoculation, and to end the debate, he gave the vaccine to his grandchildren. The result was that his granddaughter contracted polio, the grandson died.
Point wasn’t the efficacy of vaccines. Rather, it was a question of the quality of the product. Obviously, it didn’t work, and Dr. Bernice Eddy, who did the animal tests on the vaccine, knew they weren’t safe. Precedent exists as to why pharmaceutical aren’t always what they’re claimed to be. To question the quality doesn’t make anyone a nutjob or political ideologue…
April 12th, 2019 at 4:59PM
charlie: Yes, that did happen, and it was a nightmare and a cautionary tale. But anti-vaxxers aren’t questioning the quality of vaccines; they are opposed to vaccines as such, and they believe vaccines give people all sorts of other diseases. Questioning quality is fine; portraying yourself as equivalent to a Jew in the 1940s poisoned by Nazis because people insist in 2019 that you vaccinate your children is not only nutty but depraved. Obviously not all anti-vaxxers are like this – but in their irresponsible deafness to science all deserve condemnation, and, yes, ridicule.
April 12th, 2019 at 8:19PM
Fortunately, I haven’t come across anyone as you describe. Having taught hs, I have had quite a number of students who haven’t received inoculations. The arguments against vaccinations they’ve given me have been to the poor quality of testing regarding many pharmaceuticals, including current childhood vaccinations. My students, and their families, are not nutjobs, nor political ideologies. Granted, it’s one high school, in one Oregon school district. My response was to those that would claim they were…