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 13th, 2024 at 11:03AM
In practice, faculty meetings are full of people who are so clever at anticipating possible error that peacocking, straining at gnats, and word-by-word group editing is what follows. That the diversity regime became a cluster is a consequence of a related phenomenon, the usurpation of faculty stewardship by Student Affairs deanlets, because the usurpations were for purposes a majority of the faculty agreed with. The dissenters got mau-maued. Now everybody reaps what the groupthinkers sowed.
December 13th, 2024 at 12:32PM
Stephen: For me, the scandal is not groupthink in itself, because corporate life was always thus. It’s not the fact that some DEI bigwigs are bigots.
It’s the fact that the groupthinkers got away with the coercion of DEI statements and other DEI stuff. This successful coercion, in an American context, continues to shock me. I’m shocked professors let it happen.
Deconstructing the fucker will be long, ugly, and litigious.
December 14th, 2024 at 2:21PM
UD: Yes, management fads we have always had with us, and you’ll still see passing your house a weathered “Q” on a railroad car that got slapped on when “total quality management” was a thing and DEI is of a piece with the continuing tussle between “shareholder value” and “stakeholder value” that goes on in the C-suites, all of it reflecting a lack of understanding of “mutually beneficial trade,” but that’s an econ thing the B-school boys have trouble understanding.
In the universities, the successful coercion isn’t that hard to grasp. Student Affairs injected a lot of that stuff, I repeat, because it aligned with the priors of the faculty. Then that arrest went wrong in Minneapolis and dialing up the DEI was only fitting and proper, and here we are.
Professors letting it happen? Look no further than your post featuring Julia Alekseyeva, whose knowledge of the Soviet is only by acquaintance with her emigrant babushka, not from any lived experience, and yet from among all the possible job candidates Penn offered her a joint appointment. If it’s going to be ugly, in part it’s because it’s so entrenched.
I wonder, though, when an assistant professor wins one of those distinguished teaching awards, is that the same thing as the owner of a sportsball team expressing complete confidence in the head coach?