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
January 21st, 2021 at 11:54AM
Animal Skulls. One of my favorite WS ultra-short poems – generally I prefer “extended wings:”
The Pleasures of Merely Circulating
The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
Is there any secret in skulls,
The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?
Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby
Might well have been German or Spanish,
Yet that things go round and again go round
Has rather a classical sound.
– – – –
It’s just great to incant. As far as I know, Wally never recorded this. But there was a Robert Pinsky reading that disappeared in one web location but still might be found by Googling around.
Skulls aside, I like it as an ironic comment on determinism. No! Mrs. Anderson’s Sweedish baby could never have been German or Spanish, and our boy WS damned well knew it.
Still can’t seem to fully understand Trump’s (though not Trumpism) gone.
January 21st, 2021 at 3:06PM
Greg: LOVE this poem! And never discovered it in my years of WS grazing. Thank you for sending. Reminds me a little of
In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess.
http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/kermess.html
January 21st, 2021 at 8:59PM
Thank you! I did not know this poem, though I know the Icarus one. Anything Breugel interests me. You might like, Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours,” filmed to a significant extent in the Kunsthistoriches Museum. I walked out of the theater with a dedication to focus much more on simple things.* Katherine O’Hara’s – yep that KO – sister, Mary Margaret, a true rock star in Canada, was playing one of her few movie roles, and I thought her wonderful. She played a sweet, quiet, straight Canadian woman – visiting a comatose Austrian relative – who befiends, and is befriended by, a philosophical museum guard. No rock music, although she sings a lullaby
*In this respect as with”Patterson.” Strange, that brings us back to Williams.
January 21st, 2021 at 9:03PM
Oops. Meant to say “philosophical, gay museum guard.” It is a lovely Platonic relationship.