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
June 15th, 2025 at 11:22AM
Police may detain a person only when they reasonably believe that the person is engaged in criminal activity. The detaining office must be able to articulate specific facts leading to that belief. (That’s a much lower standard than the “probable cause” required for arrest.) Merely looking “suspicious” is not enough to constitute a reasonable belief that you are engaged in criminal activity, and thank goodness: can you imagine how many perfectly innocent people would be detained just because some officer thinks their appearance or clothes or stance or location or activity is “suspicious”?
Youtube has scads of videos from self-proclaimed “First Amendment Auditors” testing officers’ understanding of basic Constitutional law. Take a minute to watch a couple. Far too often the police are totally ignorant of (or totally willing to ignore) the law on detaining or arresting people.
June 15th, 2025 at 12:01PM
Dennis: Thanks for that clarification. I guess it’s still a pretty big gray area, though. This is a notorious crime/violence location, and you’re looking at a hostile and disruptive group of people who begin loudly arguing among themselves. (Most of the shootings are arguments within groups of walkers that get out of hand.) Can you intervene? And if their behavior/answers continue to be hostile, can you detain?
June 15th, 2025 at 4:38PM
Constitutional rights often frustrate people (including police and even presidents) who think they know what needs to be done for the public good and hate to be interrupted by legal technicalities. That’s precisely why we need them.
One of those constitutional rights, called the First Amendment, allows individuals and groups to assemble peaceably, to be obnoxious and hostile, to call names and insults, to argue among themselves or with others, and so on. Another, called the Second Amendment, allows those individuals certain rights to carry weapons. Both Amendments protect people in “notorious/violence locations” just as much as people in Garrett Park. They can legally be detained only when their conduct becomes or threatens to become criminal.
June 15th, 2025 at 6:38PM
The Amendments aren’t unchanging monoliths; much of what’s important in the way we conduct ourselves in civic life depends on interpretations of them by the courts and, in this case, on state laws relative to speech/behavior and the carrying of weapons.
The Supreme Court just refused to review a restrictive part of Maryland’s gun laws, a challenge to them having been brought by pro-gun forces. My state continues to look vastly different, from a Second Amendment point of view, from bloody South Carolina (which has just about the highest gun homicide rate in the nation).
There’s nothing absolutist, on the ground, about these two important amendments. Yet you seem to describe them that way.
Similarly, SC has its own set of disorderly conduct/threat to public peace type laws that should indeed allow them to intervene and in some cases detain when obnoxious, insulting, hostile behavior threatens public peace. That’s why I said in the original post that I find it hard to believe that they can do nothing until people start shooting.
June 15th, 2025 at 9:04PM
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest the amendments were or should be absolutes. I was simply describing the current state of our law on speech, assembly, and arms.
All those rights have important but very limited exceptions. As I said, assembly, speech, demonstrations, and carrying arms are protected until they break the law. If they cross the line to disorderly conduct (strictly construed), assault, “true threats” (as the lawyers say), or other illegal conduct, the police can act. They don’t have to wait for shots.
Until then, even obnoxious behavior is still legal. A good thing, too, or many of those currently demonstrating could be arrested. As you have noted about campus speech issues, it’s not enough for observers to say they feel “hurt” or “unsafe.”