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 30th, 2010 at 7:04PM
A master of education degree has no impact in the classroom? I’m shocked, SHOCKED!
January 30th, 2010 at 7:50PM
Actually, Thomas, I was surprised to see that a masters in education didn’t LOWER classroom effectiveness.
January 30th, 2010 at 11:41PM
Another interesting (but not surprising) point from the article:
“They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.”
January 31st, 2010 at 8:04AM
Great Teachers are great tinkerers…
One of the best I’ve known used to destroy his notes every year and write new ones.
The other kept a detailed diary about how each of his classes went. What worked and what didn’t – so that the next year he would do a better job. This guy was also the author of a widely used chemistry textbook.
Such activities give those of us who are not “naturals” hope. There really is not excuse for not doing at least a decent job teaching.
(Ducks..)
January 31st, 2010 at 11:21AM
hmmm. So somebody with a high GPA and a record of excellence in something besides school work turns out to be a great teacher. Aren’t these the same students who excel in Law School/Medical School and make great lawyers and doctors? Who knew?
(sarcasm/) If only there was some way we could attract excellent students with strong leadership skills to the teaching profession. I wonder what kind of incentives they might need? (\sarcasm)
January 31st, 2010 at 11:37AM
Aren’t these the same students…?
No
Incentives?
Most of the good teachers I know in K-12 do it because they want to make a difference.
And no, I am not being sarcastic.
January 31st, 2010 at 11:49AM
“I wonder what kind of incentives they might need? (\sarcasm)”
One of the things that high-quality people look for in employment choices is a reasonable degree of autonomy and the ability to stand or fall based on their own performance. It is hard to imaging anything more contrary to these attributes than the highly-bureaucratized and lock-step environment that exists in the typical public school system.