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
April 5th, 2023 at 9:24PM
I’m skeptical that it works this way. Last summer, you predicted that, in light of Dobbs, fewer students would apply to colleges in states that restrict abortion. Has that come to pass? I just scanned the application statistics for the class of 2027 at Rice, Vanderbilt, and Emory – the top private schools in their restrictive states – and it seems that all of their acceptance rates have dropped from last year. At least in the case of Emory, absolute numbers of applications increased, and they stayed about the same at Vanderbilt but dropped slightly at Rice. I’m sure one could look at other similarly-situated schools too (Tulane? Clemson? Sewanee?) but I haven’t yet. And these are not even top 10 schools. So in the case of a school like Stanford Law, ranked #2, the repellent effect of some bad publicity seems unlikely to be very large.
April 6th, 2023 at 10:01AM
I think on abortion it’s too soon/the situation within certain states too fluid at the moment to look for changes yet. And law school is a different beast from undergrad: I think applicants take a more immediately pragmatic, vocational, approach to law school, so if a boycott really takes off (right now it’s unclear how widespread/effective the boycott will be) I would indeed expect to see some effect.
April 6th, 2023 at 12:30PM
Yes, it’s true that in Stanford’s case, the substance of the bad publicity is more directly material to prospective students’ experiences and professional outcomes. I would be quite surprised if very many HS seniors applying to places like Vanderbilt and Rice are all that worried about abortion laws impacting them personally during college.
On the other hand, the more competitive a school is, the more eager prospective students there are who would take the place of the student who opts not to apply or attend as a matter of principle. It may be hard to see the effect unless it was really large, particularly if it’s a partisan effect (ie, conservatives eschew Stanford, but more liberals take their places). Then you might see an effect in the partisan composition of these schools (which may well be a problem given the partisan skew of the judiciary in the other direction at the moment), but not in competitiveness.