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 30th, 2025 at 1:22PM
Unfortunately, I can speak to this one. On 12 June 2009, my brother (and only sibling) Michael murdered our mom and dad with my dad’s home defense pistol. My dad had all the legal paperwork and was a responsible gun owner. Unfortunately, he also had a younger son who is a) a drug addict, b) a psychopath (and I’m using that in the technical sense, not the common parlance), and c) already a convicted felon at the time of the murders (see a) and b).)
Not quite three months after the murders, my brother (who also accidentally shot himself in the process) was charged, and he was convicted four years after that. He missed the death penalty by one vote, and is now serving two life terms without the possibility of parole.
The police actually figured out Mike was responsible very early in the process. I personally suspected it from the moment I heard the news at 3:30 the morning of the 13th. However, when it was time for me to write the obituary, Mike hadn’t been charged with anything yet, and as far as the press knew, he was simply another victim. Given all that — and the fact that I could have been mistaken (I wasn’t, but I could have been), I simply listed him as a survivor.
This didn’t mean that I was trying to downplay what happened. All it meant was that I didn’t want to have to eat those words later. He is my brother, after all, and it could have been necessary for me to have to deal with him thereafter. As it turned out, we haven’t communicated since about two weeks before the trial, where I testified for the prosecution, but as I said, that was four years after the murders.
Things can get complicated.
June 30th, 2025 at 3:47PM
Mondo: I hear you, and I’m so sorry you had to go though all of that. As you note, it’s almost always obvious to family members that a murder of this sort is overwhelmingly likely to have been committed by a family member. But in the immediate aftermath, when obits must go out, there may be pressure to err on the side of super-caution, and include the name of the murderer among the survivors. In the cases I allude to in the post, there was/is no doubt as to the killer.
I remain confused as to why, for instance, the extended family of a person who murdered his entire family (2 adults, 3 children) except for his wounded sister who barely escaped, decided to feature the killer as a survivor, in the same sentence as the sister he tried with all his might to kill.