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 16th, 2020 at 7:27AM
This aspect of modern life makes me happy to be a medievalist.
September 16th, 2020 at 8:23AM
I don’t know, Michael. Isn’t there some big medieval conference whose organizers were accused of white supremacy or something for not having enough of the proper kind of papers?
September 16th, 2020 at 12:12PM
These same folk have come to the academic study of Management.
The Academy of Management’s Code of Ethics contains this winner in its statement of General Principles:
“AOM members are aware of and respect cultural, individual, and role differences, including those based on age, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, and socioeconomic status, and they consider these factors when working with all people.”
I submit that it isn’t humanly possible to do all of these things, not seriously.
September 16th, 2020 at 12:33PM
In foreign languages this is an old problem: native speakers are better teachers than non-native. It isn’t true: being native doesn’t mean you speak well, or know more, or know what it is to learn a foreign language, or have good methods; I’m a native speaker of English and have some academic training in it but that doesn’t mean I know as much about it as a person of any national background who has a Ph.D. and a research record in it.
One can always also laugh about people who set up actual careers for themselves as a professional Brazilian, Cajun, etc.: “I am one, therefore I know things about it nobody else could, and I my experience is global,” etc.
These things having been said, there *should* be faculty of color, including in disciplines that teach about these issues. That’s what is so problematic about her self-representation and hire.
However, I am most interested in the future of her hires. I once had an article rejected because I was white; a peer reviewer said I was white and she was and neither of us had the right to critique the work of a non-white person. This was a false idea and it also showed that double blind peer review was not double blind, in this respected, first-tier journal.
So what about Krug’s work and Duke UP, and the reviews of her book? Is her work non-good? Was it only tolerated because people thought she wasn’t white? Or what is the deal with this . . . if the work is a fabrication, shouldn’t the reviewers have caught this, and if the book is false, shouldn’t the press withdraw it? Or what? I’m not sure, I am just curious. It’s a fascinating problem, if the author is a fake, is the work? And: how hard are the reviewers working?
September 16th, 2020 at 12:37PM
P.S. Apologies for typos above.
1/ *and I my experience is global
2/ *the future of her work: some have said they’ll never cite her again, and there are those who won’t cite Paul de Man, etc., but what is the status of this work if it was considered scientific / objective / good via blind review?
September 16th, 2020 at 3:46PM
Z: Important point on the native speakers thing: Indeed nothing at all guarantees a native speaker will teach the language better than a non-native.
I’ve now read a chunk of Krug’s book. As I wrote in an earlier comment thread, it seems to me a perfectly solid work of history, concentrating on a small part of the world that managed to resist colonization, appropriation… I doubt the book proper is “false,” although its introductory pages are full of self-aggrandizing lies. I suspect her research is legit, and her conclusions her own.
It’s really ridiculous not to quote Paul de Man – his work was challenging, original, and important. If we decided to ignore every scummy person with a good mind we’d have a lot of time on our hands. I understand the impulse to want to ignore him, and Krug, but intellectual maturity means taking worthwhile – or possibly worthwhile – ideas seriously, however icky their author.