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
October 3rd, 2025 at 7:33AM
“In a search of Roberts’ home in Des Moines, authorities found three other guns, including: A Sig Sauer Model P320 9-mm pistol, located under the cushion of a living room chair.” I’m imagining a lot of post-dinner party scenarios becoming rapidly…explosive.
Amazing stuff. At least two districts hired him, outsourcing their due diligence to outside firms, which evidently turned up nothing in their background checks despite being professional background checkers. What happened there?
October 3rd, 2025 at 9:11AM
I’ve covered several firms that specialize in background checks, and it seems plenty of them don’t do it very well. Tons of stories of bad actors being missed by the people to whom you’re paying big bucks. Why? I suspect it’s because it’s far faster, cleaner, and more profitable to do a quick run-through and then tell people what they want to hear: Your candidate is terrific! You can end your search and hire her!
The other thing that happened here, I think, is that this dude is in fact charismatic, smart, and engaged. He’s probably good at being an inspiring superintendent. So people liked him and still like him.
As for the Sig/chair: It’s the American version of that adorable scene in The Sound of Music where the children hide a pine cone under Maria’s dinner chair cushion. Haha!
October 3rd, 2025 at 9:16PM
Well no one is coming to his defense, so the liking seems to have waned.
Is it more profitable for the background checkers to suppress red flags? If they reveal them and tank a candidate, then doesn’t the client have to use them again to vet the replacement candidate? That suggests more profit. This really just seems like a “you had one job…” scenario. I get that immigration records are not easy to access (though citizenship is very easy to verify! I’ve had to file an i-9 form for every job I’ve ever taken!), but contacting a couple universities to verify degrees is very cheap and easy. The idea that you could make a living from a company that basically does nothing but that is itself amazing. That you can make that same living not doing this one thing, incredible.