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
May 9th, 2020 at 8:27PM
Also linked from that article:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/fact-checking-judy-mikovits-controversial-virologist-attacking-anthony-fauci-viral
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/12/updated-rare-move-science-without-authors-consent-retracts-paper-tied-mouse-virus
May 10th, 2020 at 2:56PM
I doubt if the problem is formalized cults so much as it is the influence of various celebrities, who assume and have an influence all out of proportion to their knowledge and thinking ability.
Also, how many people learn–as part of their K-12 educations or even college educations–about such things as the discovery of microbes, how inoculation for smallpox was discovered, who Louis Pasteur was, etc?..I’m guessing about as many as learn the rudiments of physics, which is to say, not very many.
May 10th, 2020 at 6:46PM
Hi David: True, formalized cults are only part of it. Plenty of individuals, and plenty of non-formal groups, add to the anti-vax debacle. I think celebrities play less of a role than you assume; they amplify a bit, and they offer something that looks to some like legitimacy, I suppose.
Some anti-vaxxers are worthy of pity – in particular, people heartbroken and confused by their child’s autism, and therefore prey to people like Andrew Wakefield.
Aside from ultraorthodox kids, many of whom learn virtually nothing about science, I’d bet that almost every American school kid knows the basics about the germ theory of disease. They don’t need to know physics to know that they live in an empirical world that plays by certain rules.
May 10th, 2020 at 6:52PM
Thanks, Ravi.
May 10th, 2020 at 9:49PM
Hi UD….”Aside from ultraorthodox kids, many of whom learn virtually nothing about science, I’d bet that almost every American school kid knows the basics about the germ theory of disease.”
They know that there are things called ‘germs’, which can cause disease…but how many know how a vaccine actually *works*, even at the most vague and general level?
re an empirical world operating according to certain rules…there are an awful lot of people holding beliefs ranging from homeopathy to magical crystals to various mystical ‘forces’ to astrology.
May 10th, 2020 at 10:23PM
Fortunately there is no way celebrities can achieve real political power like governorships or the presidency.
June 23rd, 2020 at 5:59AM
What if all your premises havent been backed up by rigorous science…so you perpetuate myths…I am currently reading “What makes you really ill” by Dawn Lester and David Parker. Have you the capacity to read and absorb it?….and to provide them with the answers no-one in the scientific/medical establishment have been able to do in the course of their 10years of researching. Time for truth is now…yes. Are you for or against? http://www.whatmakesyoureallyill.com. Cheers