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
June 4th, 2024 at 4:38PM
I think it started innocently enough with Justice Powell’s controlling opinion in Regents v. Bakke in 1978, which overruled the “quota” system used by the UC Davis med school to ensure that (I think) 10% of each entering class was made up of minority students. But unlike his four conservative colleagues, Powell didn’t want to get rid of affirmative action altogether, so he justified preferences, but not rigid quotas, based on the benefits of diversity.
The problem is that while quotas were a mechanical solution to a perceived dilemma (if we see that discrimination is keeping Black firefighters from management positions, we simply mandate that, say, 25% of promotions must go to African Americans), diversity is more of an ideological position. And as time passed, that ideological position became more heavily defined around notions such as white privilege, anti-racism, and, ultimately, movements to limit free speech and “cancel” opposing viewpoints (though the impact of the latter has been greatly exaggerated). And, of course, all ideological movements draw their share of grifters, extremists, or both, who claimed that if you opposed them, you opposed diversity, and were therefore a bigot.
Meanwhile, with courts (and voters) increasing hostile toward any notion of racial or ethnic preferences, those who wanted to preserve affirmative action in the old-fashioned sense decided to hang their hat on various gimmicks. One of those was the diversity statement. The problem, of course, is that such statements (which were likely originally intended to provide a reason to move minority candidates forward) inevitably became promises to abide by a certain ideological gospel, something that is offensive to free speech and the purpose of a university.
In my view, we would probably have been better off if Justice Powell had thrown in with the Court’s liberals and allowed UC Davis to keep their 10% plan. Then at least we could have more honest and (somewhat) less ideological conversations about underrepresentation on the faculty and in the student body and its causes and consequences. At the very least, we could all say what we really mean.
June 4th, 2024 at 8:28PM
Quite so; and the devolution by which admirable steps toward fairness became deadly ideological lockstep is well worth intense analysis. It must have something to do with bureaucratization – DEI administrators let their power go to their heads and become commissars…
Americans in general can never seem to leave well enough alone, so anyone could have anticipated that a reasonably simple checked box sort of thing would turn into an absurdly elaborated loyalty mandate.
DEI has in any case disgraced itself, and we can only thank our lucky democratic stars that there are still enough subversives in the country to kick hard against it.
June 6th, 2024 at 11:12AM
Not too long ago, somebody from a university that doesn’t have the U. S. News problem wrote an essay in defense of diversity paragraphs, because that columnist’s institution didn’t publish a rubric for applicants to follow, you know, pledging faith in the Church of Intersectionality. Thus those paragraphs let individuals be themselves, in a way that the other parts of the application, which has been codified beyond parody, did not. Process worship.