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
December 8th, 2023 at 4:25PM
I think that any way they answered, they would’ve lost. The point of the hearings was to demonstrate their institutions’ already well-documented hypocrisy on free speech, so if they’d gone all in and said that anti-Semitic speech is terrible and they feel the pain of the Jewish students, then the follow-up would’ve been, why don’t you do something about it as you did when you felt the pain of your black and trans and assorted other minority students and you cancelled speakers and sanctioned faculty over their pain-inducing views? To which, you know, no answer. They went the other way, and hedged about free speech, but of course the same hypocrisy is revealed in the other direction – so Harvard permits free speech when the speech advocates for Jewish genocide but not when the speech says that humans have two genders? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The way out of this one would’ve been to be less craven about everything else for the past decade.
December 8th, 2023 at 7:48PM
Rita: Absolutely. On sheer polemical grounds, given the campus nonsense that continues to go on, none of the prezzes has anywhere to go. But they might have saved their jobs and their big donors had they conceded some of the nonsense, and showed some simple humanity.
December 9th, 2023 at 1:30PM
I wonder what the nice folk on the Penn Board were thinking when they hired Dr. Magill? Didn’t they have to know that she would respond to controversy in just this manner? Wouldn’t that have been exactly what they wanted in just about any controversy she would have faced except this one?
Go Quakers!
December 9th, 2023 at 6:31PM
It was stunning how poorly prepared the three presidents were. How could they not have known that that question (or something like it) was coming? They should have responded by saying, “Of course! It was despicable! But I am a bit confused because your party has always argued that we are obligated to protect free speech even when that speech is hateful. I welcome this change in your position.”
December 9th, 2023 at 10:56PM
TAFKAU: Yes. See this piece in The New Republic.
December 10th, 2023 at 11:50AM
Yes, any one of those poseurs could have attempted to flip the script by offering a defense of free speech. To do so, though, would have copped to a double standard when it comes to the boilerplate about “demeaning” or “harassing” being grounds for disciplinary action.
December 10th, 2023 at 12:57PM
Stephen: if that’s a response to me, I was saying just the opposite. My suggestion was for the presidents to flip the script by taking these questions as implicit permission to (continue to) curb offensive and hateful speech on campus. There are, after all, two ways to resolve the double standard.
December 10th, 2023 at 4:36PM
UD: I’m not persuaded. You and Mike Munger and I are probably in the camp of Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee as not a good place to be, and that the coming Grim Strategy of punishment is not going to be pretty.
Let’s suppose, though, that one of those poseurs had taken the “Of course, it was despicable.” Those Members of Congress could have gone to town on that. “Your code of conduct prohibits ‘demeaning’ or ‘harassing’ speech. Are you telling this committee that the code of conduct isn’t valid? Was it not valid when your university [insert PC atrocity here]?”
And now, one of those poseurs has been stripped of her smirk and her lofty position. Good. And the Bears beat the Lions. Today is a day for asses kicked and names taken. I will take stock of the more troubling dimensions of the fallout tomorrow.