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
February 5th, 2020 at 9:35AM
Two thoughts. That intimacy was exactly what was transformative for me both as an American undergraduate and an American abroad at Cambridge. In my third rate church related college, I had a Greek professor who loved the classical world and put us all in awe of it. I caught the bug and it has never left me. At Cambridge the tradition of face to face supervisions was so valuable. I had a paper of mine literally torn up in front of me. The professor said, Mr. Foster, you will have to do better, and then he showed me what I needed to do. Much more important than getting a bad grade from a TA. Second, college students don’t want to be transformed today they want to be affirmed. That’s why trigger warnings are required. No body gave us a trigger warning when our philosophy professor disproved the existence of the good, the beautiful or the holy. We just had to accept it or fight and prove him wrong by argument not boycott. Again I have taken up that challenge for 50 years.
February 5th, 2020 at 12:36PM
True on both points, Bruce, and well-said. UD
February 5th, 2020 at 1:31PM
Some of us didn’t need college to have exacting teachers demanding that you think for yourself. Prior to being told to get the hell out of their high school, I had two classes with a priest and brother of the Jesuit order. The CVs were not at all traditional for clergy. Both had been married, became widowers at a young age, both had been in the military, worked in the secular world prior to entering religious life. One taught physics, the other a hybrid Ethics/Sociology class.
Above anything else, independent thought, not grades, was what mattered. If you came to a conclusion, after debate, reproach, and recalibration, then you’ll understand what it takes to become educated. They interated the subject’s conventional thinking, told us to annotate, and sent us to find if we could prove, or disprove, any of it. We were in San Francisco, which allowed for the use of libraries, research centers, and university faculty. All of that was at our disposal, so get your asses out there and start digging. Those two Jebbies brought their wisdom, gained through experience, to us, and made it apparent we were responsible for our education. And it wasn’t going to be found sitting in a classroom…
February 5th, 2020 at 5:12PM
My genius college English Professor pointed out that the Classics were traditionally pursued by those who could afford to do so. Generations of British public school boys took Latin and Greek not for any noble purpose but so they could run the colonial empires without technically going into (ugh) trade. Their methods were hardly civil or enlightened.
I don’t know what else is in that book but the quoted excerpt doesn’t convince. Universities offer the humanities and a lot more but not all can or will go into the same classroom. We are not all equally tempered.
“THE DEVIL. Dear lady: a parable must not be taken literally. The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher’s class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that… et.seq.:”
GBS – Man and Superman
February 5th, 2020 at 5:28PM
Hm – let me think about that one, Ravi. UD
February 6th, 2020 at 1:53PM
As one of my geezer colleagues pointed out recently, the most striking change in the atmosphere here is the sense of emptiness in the buildings. It used to be a standing joke that B-school faculty were never around except to dash into their classes 30 seconds before they started. This increasingly is true of the entire faculty, especially the younger ones. Office hours are conducted by text, as far as I can see. Of the four full-time faculty in the department adjacent to us on the east, I have not laid eyes on one of them in over two years, and another one not in the last six months.