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 13th, 2023 at 12:04PM
Hollywood has remained one of the few sectors of American life where success doesn’t require a college degree, and that’s probably something worth preserving (and expanding, if possible). It’s not been a great thing for our society to centralize every kind of professional success through the BA pipeline. A college experience seems like a nice thing for all in the abstract, but the reality is that the more people who believe they require one to achieve their professional ambitions, the MORE cutthroat, corrupt, and transactional real college experiences will become for everyone.
The offspring of celebrities are their own class of fore-doomed types. College can’t save them; it’s much too late in the game for them by the time they’re 18.
January 14th, 2023 at 8:53PM
Well, I’m not recommending it for professional reasons; rather, it seems to me that many many people could benefit from a few years of serious disciplined thought about the world — maybe especially people who are heading into high-profile stage and screen. The lack of focus on one’s self; the historically/critically informed consideration of various modes of art…
January 15th, 2023 at 10:27PM
Ideally, high school should provide this. Unfortunately, child actors often only pretend to go to high school, and the kids of the rich and famous snort their way through it in a haze of cocaine. The problem is that they do the same in college.
You also have to assume that these are people who could/would be serious and studious in the right environment. I’m not so sure. But in any case, if it is true, they should just do an outdoorsy backpacking trip for a summer or something analogous. At least that wouldn’t affect anyone else’s life. I’m wary of recommending college as a panacea for all the problems of the soul. Turns out to have many ill effects, as I suppose would also be true of summer backpacking programs if everyone in the country began to believe that they were prerequisites for professional and financial success in life.