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
June 28th, 2021 at 8:01PM
You will be pleased to hear that the governor of Florida, Mr. DeSantis, also is concerned about critical race theory and has ordered a survey of all college students in Florida to detect any wrongthink on the subject.
Indeed GOP operatives have been storming various school boards in a huff about the dangers of critical race theory, something one feels they probably couldn’t pick out of a multiple choice question. So to be on the safe side, they “argue” any historical event that makes white people feel bad, or discloses some racial discrimination that has occurred should be sent down the memory hole. No more learning about Tulsa.
June 29th, 2021 at 3:03AM
Matt: It’s not clear why people think it’s polemically effective to reduce the many thoughtful people who object to critical race theory in the schools to Trumpy reactionaries, but, you know, go to it.
June 29th, 2021 at 5:25AM
It is easy for Applebaum and Sullivan to make sport of the most extreme adherents of CRT, the ones who see nothing but racism in every heart and every institution, who consider the United States an irredeemably evil nation, and who won’t be satisfied until we level the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. But I do think CRT has something to teach us and could legitimately be integrated into the curriculum at all levels. For example, rather than making the facile suggestion that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 invalidates claims of institutional racism (I caricature Applebaum’s argument here, but not by much), critical race theorists might ask why, nearly sixty years after the passage of the Act, outcomes for black and white Americans remain so disparate. (They aren’t the only ones, of course; I am a quantitatively-oriented social scientist, and I would likely come at the question from a different theoretical and methodological perspective.)
And white privilege is a thing. I hate the term because of how it lands on the ear, especially the ear of, say, a middle-aged unemployed white machinist. Nevertheless, there are certain negative experiences from which white people are generally exempt, though age and social class also play into the equation. I was out of town a few weeks ago and, shortly after leaving my hotel on my morning walk, found myself in a rather stunningly upscale neighborhood. It occurred to me, as I was walking past the mansions in my grubby t-shirt and torn sweatpants, that it was likely that nobody was lunging for the panic button to summon security and that this was largely because I was white. It is, of course, possible that I was entirely wrong and had simply absorbed too much CRT, but the anecdotes do add up.
It is surely impossible to tell the history of the United States without explaining how, among other things, redlining, blockbusting, urban freeway construction, and, of course, slavery, violence, and policing have contribute–and continue to contribute–to racial inequality. Certainly, anyone who says that 2021 is no different from 1921 or 1821 is a fool, but those people are few in number, if easy to isolate for partisan purposes. (And, no, Sullivan and Applebaum don’t go that far, but they do, I think, exaggerate CRT, its adherents, and its grip on the academy, in order to stir the suburban masses into anti-Democratic fervor.)
At its base, CRT asserts that racism is more than the sum total of individual bigots, but rather inherent in certain systems and institutions, and that it benefits even those of us who harbor dreams of everlasting brotherhood and equality. It’s a point, I think, that’s both easy to exaggerate and hard to deny.
June 29th, 2021 at 8:26AM
TAFKAU: All reasonable points, though your defense rests on confidence that in its actual application in American education, possibly at all levels, CRT will make us proud. I think the chances of its fair and enlightened curricular implementation are zilch. I think it is likely to make people toxically and resentfully self-conscious about skin color in general, and that it will create social distance and distrust rather than greater understanding. Anyone who has followed mandated race-conscious pedagogical exercises for, say, freshmen at some American universities and employees at some corporations knows that most of them are more destructive than constructive.
Notice that even you can’t help caricaturing Applebaum — it’s just too easy, in the framework CRT encourages, to go after people who think it’s empirically and indeed morally valid to cite gains in civil rights, growth in the black middle class, etc., in this country.
I think it’s striking that an old lefty like Richard Rorty, in Achieving Our Country, takes for granted that racial and sexual minorities in this country have made very significant progress, and indeed that racism/sexism/homophobia among the general population has significantly declined (see for one instance the burgeoning support – currently 70% – for same sex marriage). In fact, Rorty’s book (based on a series of lectures) is animated by anxiety that we will slide back from what we have achieved. Doesn’t mean he denies ongoing injustice, structural disparities, and indeed the white privilege you (and I) experience. It means that he thinks we should start trying to make things better from a position of fairness, a position that doesn’t self-sabotagingly demonize America, Americans, American history, and American institutions.
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An addendum: Here’s Damon Linker.
“[T]he country needs liberal-minded leftists to ally with liberal centrists in taking a stand against the pious simplicities proffered by illiberal ideologues on both extremes. Public schools should be teaching the story of the past and present in a way that foregrounds the admirable as well as the shameful, that shows students how to hold contrary and complex views in their minds at the same time, that highlights our noblest principles as well as our most egregious faults, in the past as well as in the present.”
June 29th, 2021 at 10:08AM
I remember just enough about statistical inference to be dangerous, so here goes. It’s probably closer to a statement of faith than to a valid empirical claim to lay off any residual difference in labor market outcomes or wealth holdings to racist attitudes. I don’t want to get into the econometric weeds of difference-in-difference methods, that is, if average wealth holdings have gotten closer, or average earnings are converging, or what have you, since Emancipation or enhanced voting rights or what have you, why has that happened? In addition, people will likely quibble about whether to aggregate up (national average) or disaggregate (the favorite cuts being quintiles and deciles) or attempt to use nationally representative samples (the various panel studies) and whether the other regressors might not be truly independent variables. Whether serious attempt to do those investigations, which strike me as what TAFKAU is after, would lower the temperature, or whether the True Believers would scold the researchers daring enough to give it a go, remains as an exercise.