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
March 13th, 2025 at 5:47AM
I’m not by any means defending Zane, but it does look kind of like UConn came up with a shady way of getting around their union contract: pay faculty for work they shouldn’t be doing by putting the money in a research slush fund. Had UConn actually paid her for the work she did, she could, in fact, have used those funds to take the family to Disney World (though not on company time). But instead, since faculty can “waive compensation” (ha!), she could only use the this-is-not-a-salary for research purposes.
Regardless, it’s clear that she’s not very good at this. There are a *bazillion* conferences held in Orlando each year. All she had to do was choose three of them, serve as a panel discussant, and spend the rest of her time “mentally mapping” the Magic Kingdom. Nobody would have raised a single challenge.
March 13th, 2025 at 8:51AM
TAFKAU: LOL – the “choose one of a bazillion conferences” approach indeed eluded her. But I suspect this is because she’s a total non-compromiser on the matter of doing a lick of work — even panel discussant. I’d guess she’s someone with an undifferentiated resentment of the world, and is therefore always looking for ways to screw it over. For people like this, it’s not just breaking the rules — it’s deep pleasure at making fools of rule-making bodies.
As to the waive compensation thing: When I read about it, I said HUH? out loud. New one on me.
And though she hasn’t figured out – or doesn’t care to – the panel discussant thing, RMP makes clear she’s figured out how to avoid teaching. No exams, lots of speakers, lots of films, lots of group activity and student presentations, and of course everyone (it seems) gets an A.