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
July 12th, 2023 at 2:12PM
I sense you are a Posh Nosh buff, Dr. Soltan.
https://youtu.be/QuyUOpzAnXc?t=32
July 12th, 2023 at 2:46PM
Major LOL. “Louche and relaxed” is British for LANGUID.
July 12th, 2023 at 8:02PM
Tha louche/languid/relaxed triumvirate lead off the clip.
But to your point and in reference to a recent discussion, where else but at University do the American social classes mix? Where else could American Minty meet her Simon?
July 13th, 2023 at 3:40AM
Dmitry: I watched Posh Nosh again and you’re right – there’s my word “languid” front and center!
As to other non-university significant class mixing arenas – and not just in America (I’m thinking of that wonderful British film, Educating Rita) – there are fewer and fewer of these in the “recession of the elites” (I think this is Christopher Lasch’s term) into gated communities, expensive private schools, expensive forms of travel, “assortative mating,” etc. In his perceptive and hilarious book, Class, Paul Fussell calls U people the “upper out-of-sight.” For the most part, non-U’s simply never see U’s.
I suspect the only surviving big class mixing bowl is simply the great urban centers of our big cities – cafes in New York, the system of free museums in Washington DC… Places that don’t charge admission, in locations where at least some uppers still want to circulate on famous, chic, avenues.
But of course homelessness, addiction, and crime are undermining that as well.
July 14th, 2023 at 4:38PM
I think I fall more on the Hemingway side of the (perhaps apocryphal) debate about the rich. They’re not especially different from you and me, they just have more money. I suspect that the Vidal/Plimpton model of affected sangfroid is a 20th Century artifact and, in any event, was (and is) largely centered along the narrow corridor running from Philadelphia to Boston. I doubt that the U’s of Dallas or Los Angeles (even those educated at the Ivies) rate particularly high on the languid-o-meter. And the new generation of emerging U’s, the high tech billionaires, sound nothing like east coast fops, as hard as Bill Gates tries, bless his heart. Yeah, I know, old money vs. new money, but I just don’t see the children and grandchildren of the Zuckerbergs or the Arkansas Waltons summering in the Hamptons or even using summer as a verb. So I’m happy to see that kid from Akron attend Harvard without having to endure an entitled army of languid layabouts. If she’s ambitious enough to become a U, she and her kids will likely not have to act and dress like Thurston Howell III to be welcomed into the elite, perhaps not even in the northeast. Time to end legacy admits once and for all.
July 16th, 2023 at 9:22AM
TAFKAU: As my foreign, and 18th century, examples suggest, I don’t think languidity is as regional and obsolescent a phenom as you do. I’m thinking, for instance, of an Italian — Fulvia Morgana — who, although wholly fictive, embodies international U-languidity, with her uber-languid defense of her obscene aristocratic/material privileges even as she fancies herself a revolutionary voice of The People. David Lodge couldn’t make her such a successful object of satire if she weren’t in significant ways real.