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
September 2nd, 2020 at 8:07AM
I fear Scathing Online Schoolmarm too much to write very much here but Bezos has developed goods and services very valuable to his billions of customers.
I’m one of them.
If there are only a single billion more, we each contributed 200 dollars to Bezos’ net worth. I’ve been a customer for 20 years or more. That’s 10 dollars per year. I call that the bargain of the century. Bezos is welcome to his money.
September 2nd, 2020 at 11:38AM
Bill R: I sometimes feel personally responsible for his massive wealth; I buy almost everything via Amazon. There’s no denying that he took risks, was brilliant, maintains a brilliant business, and deserves a lot of compensation for all of that. But in a world of need, no one person should hold/be able to determine the disbursement of over 20 billion dollars. It’s very much like my problem with Harvard’s endowment (over 40 billion) – I would argue that over a certain reasonable amount no institution or (much less) single human being should be in possession of that much money. When your personal wealth exceeds that of many nations, you are, monetarily speaking, no longer a “person” – your wealth is so large, so absurdly out of proportion to anything that a person might like to have/do – that a suffering world has greater claims on it than you do. It is perfectly possible to imagine a person hoarding billions of dollars and doing nothing at all charitable with them (beyond the involuntary “charity” of giving up some of it in taxes – but of course the richer you are the better you are at hiding your wealth from taxation) – and that is of course the prerogative of that person. She can choose to say ha fuck the world I just wanna sit on this stuff, and there’s nothing the world can do about that. Even when there IS some charitable activity, this activity may be responsible or irresponsible — it is totally the whim of the money owner.
Morally, I just can’t make it work. Piketty’s idea of a supranational power is anathema to me, as is the idea of utterly shaking down the very wealthy. But beyond a big BIG chunk of change (5 billion? 50 BILLION???) I do think the state has a right to the rest. Just as I think Harvard should be compelled – via changes in tax laws, I guess – to stop sitting on all that money.
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And there’s something SO quaint about pieces like this one, which attack billionaires. Single digit.
September 2nd, 2020 at 5:20PM
He’s not sitting on it. He has it invested somewhere. Even if he just puts it in the bank, the bank will lend it out and people will be able to buy cars or or more efficient aircraft or seed and fertilizer for next year’s crops or an investor will finance a new idea that someone is developing.
Arguably, he is creating more wealth and happiness than if he just handed his money out on street corners.
Sorry, I’m one of those tiresome people who read too much Milton Friedman. Friedman is one of those tiresome people who are almost always right.
September 3rd, 2020 at 1:42AM
Well, you’ve got me reading the “limitarians.” More later – I mean, I’ll post about this important subject soon. UD