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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
August 27th, 2024 at 6:58PM
Two people I know have been hired by them to start this fall, and both are good scholars and normal people. One is a colleague from my former institution (a lit and film guy) who held a distinguished professorship there and was beloved, but was lured away by New College with higher pay and proximity to ocean. Both are liberal and I doubt they’d go if the place was in terrible shape, so it’s possible that the situation is not as bad as the worst reports make it sound.
August 28th, 2024 at 6:51AM
I dunno. I remember Colin McGinn announcing he was leaving a much better philosophy dept (Rutgers) for U Miami “because I love to surf.” (This was before he got in trouble and had to leave.) I absolutely get that proximity to the ocean is a thing; but New College is under sanction by the AAUP, features library directors who throw out books representing entire intellectual fields (someone thought to take photos of the discards, so it was all over the news), and the much-quoted response to this, from the highest profile member of the board of trustees, was “thanks for taking out the trash.”
As for pay, yes. But that reminds me of my favorite scene from I Know Where I’m Going, when Catriona Potts tells Joan Webster, “Well… yes …. but money isn’t everything.”
See 1:17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WeZP2NJYOA
August 28th, 2024 at 12:20PM
I just mean, these are people with something to lose professionally and I assume they wouldn’t make this decision if they thought the place was burning down. My former colleague told me things seemed a lot more normal than he expected (from the media) when he interviewed there, no sign of Chris Rufo and the faculty were all normal scholars. But, of course, their judgment could be wrong. Still, having now read several NYT articles about how, eg, scholars are fleeing Florida universities en masse that quote all of two dudes, both of whom are clearly leaving for better offers at fancier schools and pretending they’ve been hounded out for their politics (I would also like to be hounded out all the way to Cornell!), and knowing several people at UF who can attest that there is no exodus beyond the usual turnover, I am more skeptical of the media treatment of any change initiated by Republicans.
As for the AAUP, one might doubt its own commitment to academic freedom these days: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-aaup-abandons-academic-freedom. (Joan Scott responded with the rejoinder that this is not just about boycotting Israeli academics, you see, but that we should all be encouraged to boycott academics and universities in ALL the countries we don’t like! Great news for academic freedom!)
August 28th, 2024 at 8:26PM
Well, Florida was never a respectable place to be a professor. Like Nevada, it’s insanely anti-intellectual, and it has a political class that reflects that. New College was the one weird, non-athletic, non-corrupt, academic location… And now that’s gone. The model is De Santis’s beloved Hungary, where you throw out your one serious university.
August 28th, 2024 at 11:51PM
It’s bizarre to claim that New College was the only serious school in Florida. UF is one of the best public universities in the country; it’s not even remotely comparable to Nevada, which is ranked #200 or something, if it’s ranked at all. I’m pretty sure all of Florida’s public colleges are better than Nevada, even the shittiest ones. DeSantis didn’t build this, but his tenure doesn’t seem to have undermined the public universities on any standard measure of quality beyond media coverage and dramatics – good students still showing up (lured by free tuition), faculty still teaching and doing research, rankings remain steady.
New College was just a small liberal arts college for weirdos, which it seems to continue to be. Their new hires seem like normal scholars (eg) and their course offerings for Fall look pretty standard: https://newcleis.ncf.edu/pls/ncpo/bwckgens.p_proc_term_date. Even gender studies somehow survived, and after all that public recrimination! So not clear in what sense the place is “gone.”
August 29th, 2024 at 5:50AM
Read it and weep. After many Calif. schools (both Fla and CA are big rich fun in the sun states) you finally get to one Fla school (44), after which you need to scroll down to 66 to get another. Fla’s gov is famous for telling everyone all the time how embarrassed he is to have graduated from evil Yale, and the state’s cultural center houses its adored stable genius, Donald Trump. America is an anti-intellectual country, and the failure of Florida, with all its money and assets, to be anything other than an epicenter of anti-intellectuality is – well, it is what it is. Let Florida be Florida. And let Florida continue demonizing, above all other states, California, with its incredibly impressive roster of evil universities.
August 29th, 2024 at 11:02AM
US News rankings UF at 28, and 9 among publics. Nevada is 195. They are not comparable. California’s public universities have always been the best; no one has been able to dislodge Berkeley and UCLA, not even Michigan, with its effort to function like a private school. But UF is playing in that league, not the Nevada league. Floridians can demonize their competition as freely as Californians and New Yorkers demonize them. That’s just trash talk that means they are in competition to begin with, unlike Nevada.