… at the same moment, California guv tells all state municipalities to get going on the removal of all homeless encampments, and the PM of GB announces the country’s becoming an “island of strangers,” and needs new severe crackdowns on immigration.
Civic life, national life – What do these mean? We can toss that around all day, but at the end of the day, big majorities of people living in most countries/regions want a successfully assimilated population of people who don’t inject in the street.
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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
May 13th, 2025 at 7:27AM
Where do homeless people go?
The Globe profiled a family living in a tent in a Rhode Island state park. the father is working full time.
A member of my church broke her leg and couldn’t work. She went from being a homeowner to trying to get on a list for a low income apartment.
We can address this by sweeping them out of sight: driven to another town, or put into a camp, or dropped into the ocean or down a mineshaft.
Or we could build affordable housing and create a healthcare system like the ones in another peer nations.
May 13th, 2025 at 7:41AM
Newsom’s model recognizes the varied categories of homeless (criminal, insane, addicted, down on their luck employed or semi-employed people), and offers money for different categories of response/shelter. Those with active warrants/criminal behavior go to detention centers or are put on monitored probation; insane people go to mental hospitals; addicts go to residential treatment centers; down on their luck employed or employables work closely with social workers/family/friends/concerned community members to find subsidized housing or other forms of temporary shelter until they are able to fend for themselves. There are other categories of homeless (runaway teens, etc etc), and all must be accounted for and responded to pragmatically. Huge amounts of money circulate around this problem, but, until the Supreme Court ruling, municipalities weren’t able to spend it in a way that actually gave citizens back their streets.
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A recent study of 60,000 homeless people in Boston recorded 7,130 deaths over the 14-year study period. The average age of death was 53.7, decades earlier than the nation’s 2017 life expectancy of 78.8 years. The leading cause of death was drug overdose, which increased 9.35 percent annually, reflecting the track of the nation’s opioid epidemic, though rising more quickly than in the general population.
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SF’s political establishment decided years ago to give addicts the streets of their city on which to hang out for a few years before dying of an overdose. I think we can do better.
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Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents…
May 13th, 2025 at 8:38AM
What mental hospitals?
What residential treatment centers?
What social workers? What subsidized housing?
When I worked in residential treatment, it cost the state the same it would send the client to private college. Who is footing that bill? Not the current federal government.
I don’t have all, or probably any of the answers. I’m pretty sure that except for private prisons(I’m sorry,”detention centers”), all the options above will be underfunded, undermanned and overwhelmed.
May 13th, 2025 at 9:55AM
Housing options, from what I’ve read, are similarly expensive/ineffectual.
What’s new is the will, even on the part of people like Newsom, to do something. We’ll see.
May 13th, 2025 at 10:57AM
UD is going MAGA!
May 13th, 2025 at 11:11AM
Rita: UD will take promising ideas where she finds them. Bernie Sanders has some. So do conservatives.
My take on guns (very much to the left of Bernie’s) ain’t very MAGA.
May 13th, 2025 at 11:16AM
Put another way, assimilation works both ways: let the current residents buy into the aspirations of the new arrivals, and let the new arrivals buy into the norms and institutions of their new country.
The mental health part is harder: what reformers learned about the way asylum staff treated patients led to closures of those institutions rather than contemplating kinder and more effective practices.
May 13th, 2025 at 11:33AM
There are no panacea. From what I’ve read, rapidly rehousing people leads to better outcomes and is efficient.
May 13th, 2025 at 12:24PM
Ha, I was joking. Maybe “no guns, no tents, no foreigners” is the next winning combination? Enforced re-normalization after a period of excessive iconoclasm. I could support this.
May 13th, 2025 at 4:29PM
Well, I’d go for very few guns outside of the police/army; no tents outside of campsites/parks; plenty of legal, law-abiding, foreigners. Not as snappy as your phrase!
May 14th, 2025 at 12:05AM
Fortunately we have some time to fine-tune your stump speech.