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 8th, 2020 at 3:49PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NeS4ueaU6w
If this schtick was good enough for Steve Martin, it was good enough for La Bombalera…
September 8th, 2020 at 4:07PM
Geez, that department is larger than two of our colleges here and almost as large as a third. Big departments like this have the latitude to engage in this kind of hire, basically academic danegeld to the trendy mob of the year. I suspect that most of them aren’t commenting because they understood why someone like her was hired, and they don’t waste their time reading her stuff: check the woke box and let her rant so that we can get back to our 600-page manuscript on inflation in the Ottoman Empire between 1690-1700.
In another kind of hire, we all probably had experience at least in grad school with the hyper-brilliant and big-publishing prof whose lack of socialization, personal hygiene, or even sanity made exposing him to undergraduates risky. Give this type an office, frequent sabbaticals, and a steady diet of small graduate seminars. The big departments have the ability to hire and more or less hide them from most of the students.
September 8th, 2020 at 5:26PM
The silence doesn’t surprise me at all. No doubt faculty in the department have been “advised” not to comment. Moreover, tenure decisions are supposed to be confidential, so faculty know better than to comment on those decisions.
Most importantly, there’s nothing really they can say. They clearly screwed up, probably because no sane faculty member would seriously investigate, let alone oppose, a vocal, radical, “woman of color.” Doing so would be career suicide. Even the sensible members of the faculty likely just crossed their fingers and hoped that tenuring her wouldn’t blow up. They guessed wrong, but it’s too late now to justify why they voted the way they did.
September 8th, 2020 at 7:05PM
Dennis: Oh, I’m sure they’ve been told to keep quiet. Not only a tenure proceeding was involved, but litigation is probably brewing. Delicate negotiations are going on. But lemme tell you. If being a serious radical means anything, it means ignoring all of that and speaking the truth. You can be anonymous if you’d like… or speak through another person not directly connected. There are so many ways you can avoid being a coward. So the rads in the dept who are no doubt directly responsible for pushing through this appalling decision (I mean dept rads plus rads in the administration who reviewed the decision) should stick to their guns, if they actually have any guns. They can defend the decision as perfectly sound before they knew of the deceit. And they can give reasons for that. If they’re way rad (some are) they can defend the decision AFTER they knew, because race like gender is performative and self-selected. Just because essentialist reactionary people of color decide to get huffy about someone they see as elbowing in on their territory doesn’t mean we should jettison our own anti-essentialism.
Precisely because those who knew better screwed up, they too should speak up. They can say in their defense that she wrote a book that was a finalist for a couple of awards, and she was well on her way to becoming a biggish name in her field and (I’m sure) she boasted orgasmic letters of support from luminaries in that field. So… a case could be made. But they should go on to say that they knew her teaching was horrendous, and that she was a wretched colleague because of her belligerent punishing demeanor, and that if they hadn’t allowed themselves to be cowed into submission they would have voted no.
I mean, voting was probably secret! If it wasn’t, that would also be very important for us to know.
September 8th, 2020 at 7:24PM
I’d love to see that sort of honesty from the ones who knew better but I’m not going to hold my breath. Admitting the error even after the fact would still be viewed by the radicals as a betrayal, with all the career consequences that would entail.
As for the radicals themselves, if they really were “serious radicals” they might be willing to speak the truth, but isn’t it far more likely that they are merely poseurs? Poseurs by definition won’t speak the truth.
September 9th, 2020 at 10:20AM
If GWU were my place, and she dug in, it would be tough to de-tenure and fire her unless her colleagues could show that she plagiarized, used fake citations, fabricated sources, did not have the degrees she claimed to have, etc. I think that our professional affairs committee would be reluctant to pull the trigger for a fake professional persona. I suppose the nuclear option would be to see whether she checked “Black” on the employment application and census materials. We have a clause in our employment agreement that says any false information can be grounds for termination, although I don’t think race is what they had in mind.
Given that Krug praised the machete killing of that poor teenage wannabe-policeman in The Bronx a couple of years ago and that no one in her department gave a shit, it seems a stretch to draw the line here.
September 9th, 2020 at 10:39AM
tp: I’m working on a post about this problem. Writing it right now. UD