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
January 27th, 2009 at 1:30AM
Absolutely stunning. If true, it would be hard to imagine a more short-sighted action. (A hundred years from now the judgment of history will fall very hard on "the president who destroyed our museum.") One almost wonders if they aren’t playing a game of chicken, announcing that it’s going to be sold off in the hope that a donor will appear to bail them out.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:39AM
I wondered the same thing, RJO. It’s SO radical a move — the whole collection, etc. — it makes you think they’re figuring maybe this dramatic desperate gesture will, as you say, draw out some donor. But who’s got that kind of money these days?
January 27th, 2009 at 1:57AM
> But who’s got that kind of money these days?
China.
It’s only by the accidents of economic history that the world’s great examples of Greek sculpture are in London, and the manuscripts of John Keats are in Massachusetts. There’s no reason why, in a hundred years, the great historical collections of American art won’t be in Shanghai or Guangzhou.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:10AM
Or Saudis and the Emirates. Even though the price of oil has tanked, they still have scads of dough. Russian oligarchs also spring to mind.
January 27th, 2009 at 10:27AM
It will be interesting to see if this particular collection turns out to consist of artworks whose re-sale value is considerably lower than estimated. Perhaps there’s one form of Ponzi investment being used to recoup the losses from another.
January 27th, 2009 at 10:43AM
Ha, guess who over at IHE thinks these complaints about the decision-making of the Brandeis administration are just more Monday morning quarterbacking.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:19PM
Idiotic. This kind of collection is a cultural patrimony that no responsible academic institution should liquidate. It sometimes happens that smaller/poorer institutions have items that are so valuable that insurance and security costs are ruinous, but Brandeis is certainly not in that situation. I hope that this is simply a gambit to shake some money out of donors.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:16PM
It’s really terribly sad…I studied at Brandeis and spent lots of time at the Rose, which was a really lovely, charming, place. The message came to us completely out of the blue from Jehuda Reinharz, the President of the University: "I am satisfied that our commitment is unwavering; that someday we will look back and say that when the quality of education and student services was at stake, we made hard choices so that Brandeis could emerge even stronger!"
There’s to be a lot of online discussion among students and alumni about this decision, and the fact that it was neither transparent nor sensible. Also various suggestions about what might be done to prevent this (hopefully UD can post some of this on the blog).
It seems like an unbelievably short-sighted decision, not least because prices for art are so low in this market. I never thought it might be a purely strategic move on their part…comforting in a sense, but surely something is wrong if Brandeis needs to do this kind of thing to help with their budget.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:40PM
Strikes me that there’s material here for a UD limerick contest:
There once was a President named Reinharz,
Who evinced a distaste for fine arts
…
February 15th, 2009 at 2:45PM
The Rose Art Museum supporters will be able to save the museum. The act of making a donation for a charitable purpose creates a charitable trust. Brandeis is a trustee of the art collection and has fiduciary duties to honor the intent of the donors and to protect the beneficiaries of the trust (those beneficiaries being the public in the case of a charitable trust). See the recent memorandum of law filed by the WCAL supporters at http://savewcal.net.
The state Attorney General has a statutory duty to enforce charitable trusts. If she fails to act, then the Rose supporters may take direct action to prevent the breach of trust.