Nice summary. UD likes the addition of stupid. UD feels stupid is insufficiently referenced in this matter.
Nice summary. UD likes the addition of stupid. UD feels stupid is insufficiently referenced in this matter.
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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
October 5th, 2020 at 10:36AM
First time responding:
Would you have any interest in writing on the subject of “LEARNED stupidity”?
Given the Bell-shaped curve, there couldn’t be that many people BORN stupid, so the huge additional numbers must have “learned” it. These people aren’t really ignorant. It’s actual stupidity.
It’s just a thought, one that it took me eight decades and the most recent iteration of the Republican political phenomena to realize.
Your almost daily commentaries are not only very well written but you’ve managed a tone that’s smart, maybe caustic but never cynical.
That’s all from smoky California.
October 5th, 2020 at 11:22AM
Gerald: Many thanks for those kind words! It won’t surprise you to learn that I think bad college professors (there aren’t that many – most are very good) are an important source of learned stupidity. Here’s a post I wrote a few years ago about a Georgetown University student who exemplifies college-induced stupidity.
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=46540
It’s like the consul’s death at the end of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, where he realizes, as he’s expiring, that he’s actually been killed by “bad ideas.” Or think of the main character in Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, a way-committed Communist in 1950s England who one day grasps that this whole thing has been one hell of a bad idea, a stupid stupid mistake, and she’s somehow got to work her way out from under it and start getting smart.
Learned stupidity is understandable – we’re always groping for ways to live, commitments, moral clarity – but you’re supposed to worm your way out of it, like Lessing’s heroine, at some point. What’s unforgivable is the animal stupidity of political reactionaries, lazily led by their most brutal instincts.