The pandemic has shut down all of UD‘s sports scandal fun; and, as this article suggests, big time university athletics might have a lot of trouble bouncing back when covid ends. Oh dear.
The pandemic has shut down all of UD‘s sports scandal fun; and, as this article suggests, big time university athletics might have a lot of trouble bouncing back when covid ends. Oh dear.
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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
July 17th, 2020 at 2:10PM
Actually confused. The article talks about huge money paid to colleges for continuing sports programs; but I thought you have been saying that sports programs costs were higher than the income generated. Which is true? Please. THANK YOU.
July 17th, 2020 at 8:45PM
jane: They’re both true. U Alabama makes tons of money from football; so do a very few other schools. Most schools lose money on their “money” sports. Some lose immense sums of money. And for all big sports schools, there is also reputational damage – not all damage is monetary. Cheating scandals, recruitment scandals, law-breaking, etc., etc.
July 18th, 2020 at 1:32PM
To elaborate on UD‘s observation: on a fully-allocated cost basis (including debt service on the buildings) almost no College Sports program runs at a profit. Go on down the food chain, and you have money-losing programs propped up by student fees (everybody in the Mid American Conference, for instance) or by cable television (the atrocity that is college football on school nights in November, again the Mid American has pride of place) and now the so-called power conferences are limiting their football to within conference.
As far as recruiting, has anybody noticed the conjuring trick in the basketball coaches’ association asking to be rid of the college boards for implicit bias in the tests, as if nobody has been paying attention to the business model, which is recruiting athletically talented but academically dubious gladiators, a few of whom get to sign a professional contract, whilst most of them might never graduate and never lace up sneakers again once their eligibility is done?
July 20th, 2020 at 3:58PM
IN the comic strip Tank McNamara, the example of a sports mad university was Enormous State University. The school was described as a less than mediocre diploma mill attached to a football team.In the words of the comic strip: “The boosters — a collection of real-estate developers and other entrepreneurs — view the university as a “football program with a little appendage on the other side of the stadium.”
July 20th, 2020 at 5:53PM
superdestroyer: Yup. There’ll always be a Nebraska.