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 7th, 2021 at 12:00PM
There’s a counterpoint on Power Line. We could take the offer seriously, and undo the Connecticut Compromise. Merge Rhode Island into Connecticut, and Vermont back into New York.
October 7th, 2021 at 12:34PM
Stephen: And Mr UD has argued that Maryland should take over Delaware because “look at a map. Just look at a map.”
October 8th, 2021 at 9:45AM
Mark Stein’s How the States Got Their Shapes has more than anyone might want to know about the shape of states, although I can think of at least one New Republic contributor who ought to have read it.
Delaware, as well as New Jersey, began as Dutch colonies. The boundary of Delaware is a four-league radius circle centered on the Dutch Reformed Church at New Castle, to keep those Quakers at bay, continuing as the meridian tangent at the westernmost extent of that circle south to the latitude of Fenwick Island, thence east, to keep the Catholics at bay. Lord Baltimore was under the impression that Cape Henlopen, the beginning of Chesapeake Bay, was at that latitude. That’s why your Rehoboth is in Delaware rather than Maryland!
The Framers apparently saw the Connecticut Compromise as easier than redrawing the state boundaries to equalize populations and land areas as part of the Constitution. But subsequent Congresses attempted to equalize conditions among territories with sufficient population to become states. In the first round, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois all got space along the Great Lakes (the Maumee River for Toledo, the Calumet River and flat lands for northwest Indiana, and flat lands to run canals for Illinois.) Those were political decisions, done in part to allow those states connections to the Great Lakes and Erie Canal, rather than have their transportation tied to the Cotton South. That lake access came at the expense of Michigan, and an honest-to-Lewis Cass Michigan Militia actually took up arms against Ohio’s surveyors! Not quite as fraught as the Polish Corridor, but the compromise was to take the Upper Peninsula out of Wisconsin Territory (not enough people for a state yet) and it became part of Pure Michigan despite “look at a map.”
Subsequently, equalizing land areas became the objective, which might have made sense before widespread factories and urban agglomeration. Thus, there’s a base line of the north-south section of the Missouri River plus assorted smaller rivers with states configured seven degrees of longitude east to west and three degrees of latitude north to south, counting down from 49. Thus, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma would have been yet another near-quadrilateral but for Texas south of 36 degrees 30 minutes being annexed in under Missouri Compromise provisions. Thus the Oklahoma Panhandle is those 30 minutes of latitude south of the 37th parallel.
The Dakotas might have become states in the Benjamin Harrison administration, but the equal-area principle was in place at the creation of Nebraska before the Civil War.
TMI, I know, but enjoy!
October 8th, 2021 at 4:06PM
Stephen: Thanks! Did not know any of this, and it’s fascinating. I read it to Mr UD, who claimed to know about the circle.
He doubled down on his MD/DE thing by reminding me that the last time we drove into a state park in Delaware – near Rehoboth, natch – and the woman at the entrance said five dollars for in-state, ten for out-of-state, he said, “We’re from Maryland, so that’s in-state.”
October 9th, 2021 at 5:31PM
My compliments to Mr UD, and if I ever buy a season pass for the Wisconsin parks and find myself Up North, maybe I’ll try a variation on that argument at J. W. Wells or Lake Gogebic or Indian Lake, all in Da U.P.
An additional Delaware nugget: that northwest border looks like what you get with a kindergartener learning to use scissors because the initial surveyors weren’t as good as Mason and Dixon!
October 9th, 2021 at 10:15PM
Also, a correction. Cape Henlopen is a logical place to note where the Delaware River estuary becomes the Atlantic Ocean. Chesapeake Bay is the Susquehanna River estuary.