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 20th, 2010 at 10:01PM
GW has the right idea: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100416-709971.html
April 20th, 2010 at 10:30PM
The problem is that law professors don’t comprehend the massive disconnect between what they teach, how they teach it, and how the material they teach is examined – usually in a 4-hour exam that is worth 100% of the grade. This produces a huge amount of anxiety among students, which is alleviated by obsessively typing everything. Also, it makes students tune out when they “know” (as you learn eventually) what won’t be on the exam and what will be on the exam, and that’s when the Facebook / gchat / shoe shopping happens.
Now, I don’t know how Michael Krauss teaches his classes, and certainly in seminars — small discussion classes where students generate papers and don’t write exams — are terrible for laptops. And, most students wouldn’t want laptops anyway, unless they were legitimately using them to look stuff up, such as cases. (Looking up cases and laws online, as well as annotating material while in class can be a benefit of having a laptop, but to be fair most students don’t use it that way.)
Anyway, I’ve been following this discussion with interest. But, as somewhat who has taught Engineering and is now learning Law… yes, students shouldn’t have laptops in science and engineering classes. Nor should professors be using powerpoint, at least not in the traditional way. If you teach science with a chalkboard and occasional recourse to slides, then no one should have the time to use a laptop anyway, and they should be keeping up. Teach the class so no one even thinks of bringing a laptop, let alone use it to surf the web.
But, banning laptops in law school classrooms has much more to do with the obsession of the professor over controlling the classroom and the strange way in which they think that they are teaching a humanities class, when in reality they are teaching a more vocationally-oriented class that is tested in a structured way. The way to fix law school classes isn’t by banning laptops, but by changing the way they are taught and tested.
April 21st, 2010 at 7:02AM
When I used to teach freshman classes at U-Paris-9, many students would not really try to solve the questions I ask, but then, once a “correction” was written on the board, they would copy it verbatim.
Apparently, in highschool they were trained to do “typical exercises” such that the final exam was guaranteed to be a collection of them.
In short, they were discouraged from original thinking or original problem-solving – which is precisely a skill that is expected of people in a management position, rather than a mere subordinate role.
April 21st, 2010 at 8:08AM
An old friend, who has run several startups and done a lot of consulting, is teaching a business class at some university. She described some situation to the students and asked them to *think* about it…apparently, every single one of them reached for their laptop or iPhone or whatever and immediately started googling….
April 21st, 2010 at 8:16AM
I still don’t understand the ‘type verbatim’ meme: hardly anyone types that fast, even in this keyboard-raised generation. Why would people typing notes be more inclined to transcribe than people taking longhand notes? Anecdotes are not data, but I try to get verbatim quotes in my notes longhand, if a phrase catches my attention and I act quickly enough to remember it; so am I guilty of not thinking becuase I think experts are people whose exact words are sometimes illuminating? I don’t think so.
April 21st, 2010 at 9:13AM
Ahistoricality is right. It simply isn’t possible – unless you know Gregg shorthand – to transcribe a lecture directly to a computer. I’ve been trying to do this recently with videos.
Taking notes in a science class used to mean putting in your notes what the instructor put on the blackboard, then taking your notes home and working on/with them.
This actually did lead to a certain amount of passivity. Nowadays with all the instructor supplied teaching aids, you’d wish that students would sit there and THINK about the material and maybe even ask questions.
I’ve even heard that this even sometimes happens.
April 21st, 2010 at 11:46AM
Okay, I’m just going to ask a question that may or may not have anything to do with this topic, but it still needs to be asked. As a graduate student, I was repeatedly denied funding because my university “just didn’t have any.” As a (relatively) newly-minted Ph.D., I have been repeatedly denied jobs because, quite frankly, they don’t exist in the humanities–tenure lines are being cut, monies are sent elsewhere, funding for the humanities is drying up. All of which means that I am now moonlighting as an adjunct for usually lousy pay and no health benefits.
Given all of that, I have to ask, Where the eff are these schools getting all of the money to dole out MacBooks and iPads and such to students? Is all of it coming from Apple?
April 21st, 2010 at 3:11PM
Somewhat related to this: I just posted a think piece about the impact of Internet video, and would be interested in thoughts from UD and others here.
April 22nd, 2010 at 7:19AM
They bury the MacBook & Ipad & Ipod money in the tuition and fees.