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 6th, 2025 at 12:54PM
I’m not sure what purpose is being served by this anti hijab law. Because it doesn’t feel like a pro secular measure as much as an anti Muslim measure. The issue in the US is Christian fundamentalism is encroaching on public schools. They would love a law like this with an exception for the one true faith of course
February 6th, 2025 at 2:19PM
Matt: I think there’s a difference between how such laws feel to Americans, and how they feel to French Canadians… and indeed to the French, who have profoundly influenced Quebec, and who share a set of secularity laws.
That is, this feels to you, as (I assume) an American, a discriminatory move against religious people. Ours is a profoundly religious nation, and we see nothing wrong with all forms of religious expression. We don’t see any of it as a threat to our national identity/history.
I think you’re wrong, for instance, that Christian fundamentalists here would like Muslim-dress-suppressing laws. They rightly regard strict Muslims as being a lot like strict Christians. They share a lot of the same values.
The French and French Canadians, OTOH, see this sort of religiosity as threatening the secular foundation of the nation/province. They don’t see themselves as discriminating, but rather as asserting/defending a certain set of essential truths about the state.
From an editorial in Le Monde about veils in schools:
The need to preserve this fragile balance and to protect both pupils and teachers from religious pressures and quarrels should guide political leaders, particularly those on the left, for whom secularism has long been a central marker… The concept of secularism deserves to be more widely taught as a historical achievement rather than an abstract theory. It also deserves to be defended, certainly not as a means of discrimination, but as a guarantee of concrete freedoms for all, in particular the right of women and men to choose and live their identity independently.
While virtually our entire political class, shepherded by Pastor Trump, must flaunt their piety, the opposite is true for places like France/French Canada.
For many truly fundamentalist Christians here, women in hijabs, and especially women in burqas, represent I’m guessing an admirable modesty/women-suppressive gesture. Americans have no objection to – rather a fascination with – polygamy (a fundamentalist Mormon and Muslim thing) and male dominance in the family, and other scripture-related stuff that pertains as much to fundamentalist Muslims as to fundamentalist Christians. Fundamentalist Judaism – the most enthusiastic Trump-voting demographic in the country – also of course covers up and subordinates its women. Secular places like France and Quebec don’t like this sort of thing. They prefer equality. They think secular laws are one way to express the will of the people (large majorities of French and French Canadians support these laws) that the public-facing state do what it can to uphold secular values.