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
April 6th, 2021 at 9:11AM
[…] post continues the theme in this one, where a propagandist is quoted glorying in the fact that (as she tells it) many young women today […]
April 6th, 2021 at 10:47AM
Oh god, not Vivian Gornick again. I say again because when I was a wee lad in the graduate program in English at Columbia, a chapter from one of Gornick’s memoir-ish books was a reading for the composition course we were all compelled to teach. It was a senseless, meandering piece about wandering around New York on foot; the style of it suited the subject matter, in that sense. I still think, often, with irritation, about that piece of writing. Since I do often think of it, though, I suppose that suggests that it has some power, even if that power is an irritant.
April 6th, 2021 at 12:24PM
JKW: Most English profs compelled to teach from a set reading list know the special hell of trying to say something good, or at least intellectually valuable, about second-rate stuff. It’s not quite as bad as having to gather each day at The Dear Leader’s statue and thank him on your knees for his miraculous leadership of the Progressive Korean Peoples, but it’s definitely humiliating and insanely inauthentic.
Not that all set reading lists are bad. St John’s College has figured out how to make reading lists instructors respect.
April 6th, 2021 at 4:09PM
Believe it or not, the Gornick piece was far from the worst offering. We were allowed to choose half of about thirty readings, many (but not all) of which were much, much shittier than the Gornick article. Only one or two, by Joan Didion and Mark Edmunson, stand out as having been good. But that left another ten or so assignments that demanded readings, and there was a bank of a dozen or so mediocrities–as opposed to atrocities–from which to choose. The atrocities, ten or so, were so awful and unintelligible that they would have made the course unteachable.
Another article I had to teach, at least somewhat intelligible one, was by André Aciman, who is inoffensive and even somewhat charming in person, but whose prose makes me want to vomit. That piece was so ridiculous that when I had to write a “lesson plan” as part of the dreaded Teaching Practicum all graduate students had to endure I made up the silliest lesson I could conceive of. (Perhaps needless to say, this course was pass/fail.) I included something called a “fishbowl exercise” and even incorporated a field trip into my lesson. The field trip struck me as maybe too much, and for a moment I feared that perhaps my higher-ups would realize that I was not taking their course as seriously as they repeatedly demanded. But I need not have feared. I was told that the lesson plan was fantastic, phenomenal, really great, and I passed the course with ease.
And yet some set reading lists, as you say, are perfectly respectable. The set list for the actual literature course that all Columbia freshmen take, Literature Humanities, is a real joy to read and to teach. Alas, the composition course, which is crappy enough on its own, suffers greatly and inevitably by comparison.