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 15th, 2024 at 9:13AM
Don’t these have a solid 100% failure rate?
February 15th, 2024 at 11:06AM
What does failure mean here? Failure to interest other investors/catastrophists?
February 15th, 2024 at 11:59AM
“a desire to create a new world from scratch and then choose who gets to be a part of it”
I don’t know, sounds like every existing polity. The US – a new world created from scratch with rules governing who gets to be a part of it. I like this seasteading, model cities, colonizing outer space stuff. Very American, to my mind. Think of our looong tradition of bizarro communes and alternative communities this country has been incubating from the outset – Brook Farm, Fruitlands, Oneida, Amana, New Harmony, basically the entire state of Utah… Those people were also wedded to “Mindsets,” not quite the same one as the Silicon Valley position, but perhaps equally misguided in different directions. The guy who founded Oneida preached that Jesus was an electrical charge that passed between people through bodily fluid, most notably semen.
Not that we should be publicly funding any of these harebrained ideas, but I don’t see why we should be prohibiting people from voluntarily joining in and trying out a new way to live until they realize it sucks and leave.
February 15th, 2024 at 12:41PM
Rita: Major LOL. And of course you’re right – let ’em do what they want to do. Only one proviso: Some of these people are so astoundingly rich that they could buy virtually the entire state of Maine, for instance, and I’m not sure we want that to happen.
February 15th, 2024 at 12:52PM
Well, a lot of these earlier communes needed big money to get going too. But I don’t think the state of Maine is for sale, so I’m not too worried.
There was a reasonable defense of one of the SV model-city projects in the NYT recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/opinion/flannery-associates-billlionaires-woodlands.html. I’m pretty sympathetic with this view – there is no obvious reason why we should only favor or allow governments to organize communities when sometimes enterprising individuals might have good or innovative ideas about how to make improvements. Maybe even billionaires might have something interesting to offer. It seems relatively low-risk – so long as buy-in is voluntarily, if they fail, people can just return to conventional communities. This Nation article is far too bleak.
February 15th, 2024 at 1:07PM
No, the state of Maine is not for sale, but enormous stretches of it are. Billionare John Malone owns so much of Maine (and other states) that he begins to look pretty kingly. Bill Gates and a bunch of Chinese investors are also buying up huge swathes of the USA. We have a lot of enormous pretty empty states (and getting emptier as we stop having enough babies to keep this vast national enterprise populated), so we can expect more, and more ambitious, John Malones.
https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-babies-children
February 15th, 2024 at 1:57PM
You can’t be a king if depopulation robs you of subjects!
February 15th, 2024 at 2:07PM
True. But you can be a legend in your own mind.