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 21st, 2023 at 5:56PM
Truly, who reads or cares about these boilerplate messages anyway, even when they’re written by a human? This precise text, absent the giveaway at the bottom, would not have raised a single eyebrow. In an ideal world, the deans would use AI to write the message, the students would use AI to write their protest against it, and the school paper would use AI to cover the conflict, all while everyone involved spent their own, human time on something actually worthwhile. Automate it all and go live your life instead of endlessly re-enacting these absurd bureaucratic dramas.
February 21st, 2023 at 10:52PM
Yes – my last sentence nods in this direction. And also no – they’re only boilerplate because lazy cynical institutions have made them so. It matters a lot, in circumstances like these, that students recognize the people who run their schools as flesh and blood people. It matters how they write/talk.
February 21st, 2023 at 11:38PM
It would be much easier for me to believe schools were run by flesh and blood people if they stopped sending out these programmatic, pablum-filled missives every time there is some kind of EVENT in the world that they did not cause and over which they have no control, but about which they feel compelled to officially comment on anyway. Verdict in a police shooting case in another state? Missive from the dean! Earthquake in Turkey? Missive from the dean! Shooting in Michigan? Missive from the dean! Fake hate crime on campus? Extra-long missive time! Composing these things is an essentially robotic activity, so why not outsource it to an actual robot? That’s the second-best alternative to ending the practice of sending missives and expecting these people to manage the university in front of them. But why dream of such utopian possibilities?