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
January 19th, 2025 at 4:27AM
As long as k-12 state and Federal funding is tied to the number of asses in seats, no long term changes will occur. Having been a HS teacher, it became quickly apparent that quite a number of students had no place in a formal school setting.
But, i also had more disruption when class size increased. Maybe it was an attempt to gain attention, or a lack of adequate time with a teacher, but acting out became far more evident when my class size was at 20 or more.
I also worked with NAACP’s after school tutoring programs, and those student encounters were a joy. I worked with groups of no more than 4-5 individuals, many of whom had been behavioral problems. But, when the student and teacher had adequate time to assess what the kids were lacking, we could help them advance. Quite often, it was a literacy issue. Some couldn’t read near their grade level, which created a great deal of anxiety. When those students finally had an adult that gave a damn, and helped them understand the written word, it made a remarkable improvement..,
January 19th, 2025 at 6:28AM
As always, charlie, a really helpful comment from the inside of the problem. Your description of your work with small groups is heartening.
I get the cynical asses in seats thing, but it still amazes me that, even with this motivation, schools like this one keep manifestly nutty aggressive armed people in class. It’s criminal negligence, really. And if the complaining teacher is right about restorative justice circles, it takes things to a much more cynical level.
Background for all of this: Abigail Zwerner.
January 19th, 2025 at 11:13AM
UD, thank you for the links. School districts have a large inventory of bureaucrats with advanced degrees in psychology and behavioral studies. And these clowns can’t figure out how to not be held hostage to heavily armed six year olds? Are these vastly underachieving human warehouses getting Fed subsidies precisely because they’re such massive failures?
I bring this up based on what Jaime Escalante experienced when he first began teaching at Garfield High in East Los Angeles. Escalate was the basis of the movie, Stand And Deliver. Garfield HS was violent and gang ridden, and was so poorly administered that it was on the verge of being taken over by the state of CA. Nevertheless, Escalante persisted in getting his students proficient in mathematics, to the point of eventually teaching advanced calculus. As hard as he worked, the administration road blocked his work. He came to find out the reason was that if academic achievement did increase to the point Escalante wanted, Garfield would lose a great deal of Federal/state subsidies. The system was predicated on student failure, not success.
Well, no greater indication of failure is having the occasional school shooting, with the strong possibility of death and injury. If so, that school district can solicit Fed and state grants for student behavioral remediation. It’s also a whole lot easier to get a public bond passed to build a brand new school, replete with enhanced safety measures to keep the little darlings from shooting each other.
Follow the money and you’ll find the answer….