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
April 8th, 2010 at 11:07AM
Gee, sounds like she’s realizing the UC system needs to hire more instructors (preferably full-time with real salaries) so they can conduct classes of a reasonable size.
Of course, this will require California undergraduates to pay the same sort of tuition students in other parts of the country pay for higher ed.
April 8th, 2010 at 8:21PM
At the risk of getting my ass kicked once again-
Many years ago, I had some great mob classes. Philosophy, constitutional law, English, and (gasp!) chemistry.
These classes were taught by truly great lecturers and were on the “you must take x from y” class list at NU.
At the junior/senior level I took much smaller classes from still exceptionally good teachers.
What the hell is wrong with a system like this?
Bill
April 9th, 2010 at 10:26AM
Bill, I’m with you on this one.
April 9th, 2010 at 6:04PM
Professor Church. Renaissance and Reformation History. 1965. Brown U. All lecture, all the time. What a wonderful experience.
April 9th, 2010 at 10:30PM
Students bear some responsibility for this, too. I was able to take excellent, very small, classes at UC, by choosing carefully. This did require that I accept that the professor would be serious about teaching, and that students would be expected to be attentive – and to participate fully in class. This wasn’t necessarily the experience many of my fellow-travelers sought.
That said, my only large-auditorium class was a superb Shakespeare course taught by a man who understood perfectly how to work the crowd. You can’t just hire instructors; you’ve got to hire good ones.
April 10th, 2010 at 3:50AM
All true, An. I’d add that choosing the right classes is probably very difficult in a big school…