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 27th, 2020 at 12:16PM
It’s not as simple as all that. At big football schools, alumni and other giving strongly related to how well the team does.
Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose Auburn announced they were reducing their football program to an intramural league and were going to devote the money saved to, I don’t know, “Critical Race Theory and Modern Feminist Alignments in Interpretive Dance Theory”. Would donations to Auburn go…
1) Up
2) Down
July 27th, 2020 at 1:08PM
Bill R: I don’t claim it’s simple – my list of school-destroying elements in the WSU debacle isn’t meant to be complete. There are many aspects to the destruction of a school via its sports program. And there are many ways – short of the disaster WSU’s heading into – to do serious damage to a school’s intellectual integrity via sports.
Now Auburn’s situation actually IS simple. It’s rolling in money from football because ain’t much else Auburn people care about – which is reflected in the school’s ranking and its truly singular long history of appalling academic scandals – scandals that would have embarrassed/shaken up real universities.
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/?s=auburn
So no denying what you point out – if Auburn announced it was taking seriously ANY intellectual pursuit at any cost to its sports program, blood would flow in the streets of Lee County.
Also no denying what is indeed a very simple point – Auburn ain’t ANY kind of university.
July 27th, 2020 at 5:22PM
Suppose Auburn
An argument that applies to the outlier, eg LeBron James, is not an argument that applies to many other organizations or people.
This Is also known as the ‘Well, Bill Gates Is Still a Billionaire, So the Coronavirus Economic Crash Can’t Have Been Too Bad’ argument.
July 29th, 2020 at 5:29PM
@Bill, the United States has approximately 4,300 degree granting unis/colleges. Less than a hundred belong to P5 conferences, which comprise the highest level college teams. Most unis do NOT have a big time sports program, or, in many cases, an athletic program of any kind. The notion of sports being a vital vehicle of donor/alumni money makes no sense when one bothers to look at the numbers. Unis are far more dependent on tuition and taxpayer subsidization than donors to keep the doors open.
But, as in the case of Wazzu, the evidence supports the conclusion that aspirational athletics programs are destroying the academic side. Excellent example is the University of California system. Out of ten campuses, only three have a football team, and two are P5s. UC Davis is in a lower tier conference. A lack of big time sports hasn’t hindered the non sports campuses. But the flagship, UC Berkeley, is hemorrhaging money because of their incredibly stupid financing deal to renovate their football stadium. The details are sordid and arcane, but Deadspin has done a very good job of summarizing the details. The result is one of the finest public universities is forced to compromise their academic mission. UC functionaries used the same arguments you’re quoting to justify something that never made any sense. The current economic collapse is destroying the facade of college athletics being an integral element of a university academic mission…