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
July 1st, 2019 at 2:55PM
UD, I don’t understand the objection to the burkini. It doesn’t cover the face and is very similar to rash guards and sun protection gear. Quite different from the niqab etc.
July 1st, 2019 at 3:22PM
Anon: For me, and clearly for the French, it is inevitably seen in context, and in terms of its cultural/so-called religious (that is, people who wear it talk about religion, but there’s no religious warrant for it) assertions. It is of a piece (if you will) with the burka-like tendency (why do people call it the burkini, after all?) to cover shameful women.
Certainly single-sex swimming is next, and even in the US various woman-hating and women-hiding subcultures are constantly trying to get public swimming pools to allow sex segregated swimming.
You can say, as you suggest, that fabric yard for fabric yard the burkini resembles other body-covering forms of swimwear; but the symbolic power and the empirical cultural meanings of the thing go way past this, and the French have every right to loathe what it stands for and to wish not to see it in their shared civic life.
July 1st, 2019 at 4:29PM
If the women were demanding that the community pool have a female-only day, or a burkini-only day, then I would agree with you. But if they showed up at a (presumably non segregated) swimming pool during the heat wave in their burkinis …. ? Their faces aren’t covered. They are not withdrawing from society. And those burkinis are form-fitting. I would bet that niqab fans do not approve of either burkinis or women at co-ed community pools.
Here’s another interpretation: the French expect women to be attractive and on display. A burkini interferes with the appreciation of the female form. Male gaze, public space, blah blah blah, I’m no English professor, but I’m sure you know what I’m getting at. Some of the reasons the French loathe burkinis may have little to do with their ideals of civic life.
Disclaimer! A French woman once picked a fight with me in Miami because I had dressed my extremely pale son in a goofy sun hat and full sun suit. Why do you dress him that way???? She was so tan. A leathery crone of 30. It was surreal.
July 2nd, 2019 at 6:29AM
Anon: Love the Miami story! But I think the roots of the burqa/niqab/burkini objection for French men as well as women do not lie in a sexy national aesthetic (lots of countries without this aesthetic have banned burqas). If you take the French at their word (and they’ve had tons to say about it), the roots lie in a profound egalitarianism (and of course secularism). I mean, a real one, a real sense shared by many French that men and women are actually equal. When you very visibly swath women in tight or loose fitting body armor that quite crudely and obviously singles out women in a way men are never remotely singled out – a way that shouts that women are different from men in their physical unacceptability, and their bodies therefore need to be wrapped up – you do something deeply demoralizing to the cause of equality.
Maybe it’s because I have a daughter and spent time when she was little literally protecting her from the sight of women in burqas, it’s very clear to me that a primary reason to object to a subculture of women in your country assiduously covering their hair and their bodies and their faces lies in its effects on girls and young women, people in a formative place as they work out their status in their country. This applies of course not just to Muslim women but varieties of Orthodox Jewish women (some of whom, in Israel, wear burqas). Modern societies committed to equality need to object to politically corrosive groups within them keeping their women chattel (or featuring women keeping themselves chattel). Markers of chattel-status include, I believe, the burkini. Of course I take seriously what you say – we need to be careful in distinguishing between unobjectionable modest/heavy dress and demeaning demoralizing suppressive garb. If the French are a little too eager to pounce on things like burkinis, I say let them. They have a fragile, hard-won world to protect.