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
February 1st, 2022 at 9:58AM
I think if there was a mental health issue, the school may be constrained by confidentiality rules from informing students or faculty about his history or even what was going on with him at present. I had a student once who made much less serious threats (also while having what appeared to be a psychotic break), and the faculty teaching him that semester were not told anything about his history or his current issues. If we had been, we could easily have put together from our various experiences with him what was going on, but left to our own devices to interpret his bizarre behavior, we spent half the term assuming it was isolated to our own classes and probably something about our individual teaching. (Ironically, it was ultimately my probable violation of confidentiality rules that got him removed – I complained about his behavior to a senior faculty member, who then emailed the dean and demanded that the student be removed from my class immediately, which resulted in his being removed from school entirely, in an email in which all his current profs were CC’ed, and then they started talking to each other and realized that this was obviously a crazy person all along and we could have been spared much class disruption if we had the slightest shred of info about this earlier.)
February 1st, 2022 at 7:19PM
Rita: Yeah, the confidentiality rules often play a woeful role in these problems.
In the particular case at UCLA, we need to know a lot more about the timeline, since I’m beginning to think Harris was pretty obviously unstable back when the hiring discussions took place, so the problem predates the confidentiality business, and has rather to do with whether the hiring committee/philosophy faculty did in fact have reservations from the outset, but for whatever reason proceeded nonetheless. And how about recommendations, or simple scuttlebut? It was scuttlebut that brought down Jessica Krug – people started openly talking about her.
What went wrong here? How soon, after students loudly complained of his lunacy, was he removed from the classroom? Think back all the way to U Alabama’s mass murderer, Amy Bishop – there’s evidence the place knew she was a dangerous nut, and there’s evidence some people were positively afraid of her. Yes, they were in the process of finally getting rid of her — but it was just that dismissal, after allowing her to stay there for years, that set her off and starting her killing.
I’m not saying universities have to have ESP and intuit the special danger of certain faculty. I AM saying that I worry about why universities seem to miss – or find a way to tolerate – those very rare people who seem quite overtly and menacingly mentally ill.
February 2nd, 2022 at 4:09PM
It does seem that in some cases, the incentives pull both ways. Even if a person has a history of crazy, people can recover and improve, and you don’t want his every effort to do so to be tarnished by essentially announcing over the intercom, “HERE IS A PREVIOUSLY CRAZY PERSON.” But sometimes recovery also fails (or never even starts), and then it really would be in the public interest to reveal this information. Not sure what the situation with advisors at Duke was; even if there were signs, maybe they mistook some of them for brilliance? I wish I could say that this would never happen, and the difference between brilliance and insanity is self-evident, but I’m not sure that is always the case, particularly in some humanities fields…
February 2nd, 2022 at 6:11PM
Rita: In the Duke case, there’s an uglier possibility: What if the professors/administrators didn’t care, weren’t particularly watching? Busy with other things. Where are the statements from his Duke mentors lamenting the loss of what they remember as an exceptional student to mental illness?
February 2nd, 2022 at 9:12PM
Maybe they were careless. On the other hand, if one of your students ends up doing something like this, might you not hide from the media to avoid being implicated, even if you at the time did think he was brilliant? Subsequent events have now made it crystal clear that what appeared to be brilliance was actually just insanity, and you were dumb. But, at least from my experience of graduate advising, your conjecture that they just turned a blind eye is probably more likely.