Here’s a list – Ten Warning Signs of a Bad Professor – that does a pretty good job of covering the main characteristics of poor or indifferent instructors.
I can think of a few other things, like uses too much technology.
Speaking of which… UD‘s blogpal Veblen sends her this account of PowerPoint use in the American military.
Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=20586
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 6th, 2010 at 7:09PM
Here’s an actual PowerPoint presentation on strategy in Afghanistan:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/Afghanistan_Dynamic_Planning.pdf
..at least it avoids the bullet-point style
But I think the problems with this go way past pitchmanship. Too many abstractions, unanchored to implementable specifics.
January 6th, 2010 at 7:51PM
The only two I question are #5 and #6. The amount of “undoable work” depends critically on the student. Too many students today regard reading a book of more than 100 pages and writing more than a 5 page paper as “an undoable amount of work”.
“Incredibly petty rules” are often required by some administrator types…like the 12 page list of policies that I was once told had to be part of every syllabi. It may say more about people other than the prof.
January 6th, 2010 at 8:12PM
> UD’s blogpal Veblen sends her this account of PowerPoint use in the American military.
I remember hearing someone on the radio a few months ago propose a sure-fire way to defeat the Taliban: he suggested air-dropping thousands of copies of PowerPoint over their training camps. Within days their whole operation would be paralyzed.
January 7th, 2010 at 9:41AM
It never occurred to me in college that it was permissible to bring in a giant bag of food, spread it out over an entire table, and then noisily munch and slurp for 25-30 minutes of a class. I don’t have a food policy myself, but I understand why some people do. A large subset of students comes to college completely unsocialized, and their behavior is disruptive. We are doing them a favor in the long run by stomping on it.