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
October 11th, 2023 at 1:35PM
Nothing scarier than CEO-bros suddenly deciding they have a conscience. And they shall be led by a hedge fund.
October 11th, 2023 at 2:11PM
Total: It’s not just hedgies. But of course I agree Wall St types are far from moral exemplars.
But talk about a sliding ethical scale.
Plus it’s a matter of pragmatics. They’re right to blackball terror-symps.
October 12th, 2023 at 9:01AM
I can write some dialogue they can use in interviews: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a group that supported Hamas”?
Maybe they can get a list from Joe McCarthy.
If we blackball college students every time they did something stupid like this, nobody would be hireable.
October 12th, 2023 at 10:20AM
Total: I somewhat but only somewhat agree. I agree that college students are young and do dumb shit and shouldn’t be made to suffer because of it. Some of the pro-Hamas Harvard groups have already pulled back from the statement, and I assume some individual members of the groups that signed on are doing the same.
BUT. Some of the signees are grad students/activists of various ages, and some of these I think should be held to account. Obviously those who really are degenerate assholes should be made to feel that at least some of civilized – even semi-civilized – society wants nothing to do with them.
And even there, in an age of global capitalism, most of the true degenerates can simply work in offices outside of NYC… I don’t, in other words, share your outright McCarthyism worries. But I agree that it’s easy – under the influence of current outrage – to go too far.
October 12th, 2023 at 1:19PM
These students groups have been trotting out this same script for every clash between Israel and the Palestinians since back when I was in college. Literally the same rhetoric – “open air prison,” “settler-colonial occupation,” etc. Most of these groups have about 10 members, who are hardcore, and the broader liberal majority of students is just reflexively accustomed to viewing “the Palestinian cause” as part of their “team” and hitting the like button for them. I think they were basically operating on autopilot on Monday, issuing their standby “statements” without any thought that the changed circumstances would alter anyone’s response and not imagining that the indifferent applause to which they’re accustomed would not be forthcoming. Now that they see it’s not, they’re walking it back. But there is a certain braindead rote-ness about this ritual already, as is so often the case with student activism on every side. Everyone just playing their roles and phoning in their dueling “position statements.” Depressing.
October 12th, 2023 at 6:33PM
Rita: Along these lines, even David Lodge couldn’t have conjured Derron Borders.
October 12th, 2023 at 10:38PM
Well, could he have imagined all the satirical gold to be mined in 2020s university admin offices everywhere? You got your DEI guy promoting mass murder in the name of equity and inclusion, your lady at Vanderbilt last year mass-emailing a statement of condolence about the MSU shooting with “Generated by ChatGPT” in the signature, your trauma-informed puppy petting pedagogies everywhere. Pure gold.
But I just wonder about the extent to which campus politics (and social media politics, which resembles it) isn’t even trying to engage with the real world anymore, but is just the repeated recitation of canned scripts for every occasion. It was suddenly jarringly noticeable this time b/c the world itself veered off-script – Israel’s security failed catastrophically, resulting in the massacre that is always threatened by its enemies but usually prevented. The script suddenly sounded off. (I’m pretty sure that once the casualties in Gaza surpass the Israeli ones, the script will re-assert its role and we can all tune out of reality again and comfortably return to chanting the accustomed slogans.)
October 13th, 2023 at 2:29AM
Rita: The “repeated recitation” you describe reminds me that the vaunted concept of “performativity” pertains much more interestingly, I think, to one’s political performance these days than to any other social behavior.