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
May 17th, 2010 at 3:29PM
I’ve spent all year reading studies about education, and while, yes, they are on the whole kind of laughable, it might only be so because 1)people who can craft really good quantitative studies of anything don’t go into education, and 2)it’s really hard to quantify the effects of any kind of pedagogy, especially when most of them claim as their great benefit some kind of unquantifiable moral transformation. This is less true of science and math education, but unless you want only math and science taught because their effectiveness is easier to quantify, this seems to be a problem that is not going to be overcome anytime soon.
May 17th, 2010 at 4:01PM
If memory serves, there are a few ed-research results which do seem to hold up, including:
1)It is better to teach people foreign languages at a very young age, and
2)Teenagers should not start school at ungodly early hours of the morning if you actually want them to *learn* anything
…neither of these results seem to have had much influence on practice.
May 17th, 2010 at 7:05PM
I could not agree more with the author of this piece. I am an European mathematician working in the US at a quite good research university; it happens that I have been involved in an education project / research involving high school math teachers and university professors of math education. I NEVER saw anything like that in my entire life, I could not believe my ears: the math education professors together with the teachers were claiming erroneous facts about even the most basic mathematics (for them an exponential or a rational function is the same thing). These people, including the education professors would not had a high school diploma in Europe, given their appalling command of the subject. Next time, when I have to teach poor American students math classes at the university I will understand why they know nothing and why they have not been used to study mathematics… with teachers like that!
May 17th, 2010 at 7:34PM
I am gonna echo Matt here, but the writer of the piece is spot-on: “And where the studies were rigorous, the curriculum often flunked.”
Either the study sucks and we don’t know if the curriculum is any good OR the study works to verify the curriculum isn’t any good.
Rita’s point goes to a larger issue: the people that *should* or could be authoring these studies, and many times the people that should be teaching these courses, know far in advance to stay away from education. It’s a gulag.
How do schools never get better? We can make small strides in our own classrooms but schools continually fail kids. What we need are some laptops and powerpoint. THAT’LL LEARN ‘EM GOOOOD.
May 17th, 2010 at 10:16PM
Teaching in modern high schools and community colleges (and, I fear, many universities) is to education what bloodletting was to medicine. Of course rigorous studies show that it fails utterly.
Part of the problem is that the goals (measured by curriculum standards) are completely wrong.
For example, math students are tortured for months if not years with manual solutions to quadratic equations, and their proficiency in doing so is part of government and international curriculum standards.
But this is completely stupid. The correct way to solve quadratic, cubic, and quartic equations are these formulas, which are the sort of thing that should be trusted to a pocket computer anyway. And there is no reason to believe that high school graduates will encounter quadratic equations more often than any other equation.
We just spend months teaching kids multiple ways to implement the quadratic formula because it’s short enough to do manually, but it still makes you look like you’re teaching or doing math, in the same way that bloodletting looks vaguely like real medicine.
May 18th, 2010 at 7:52AM
Dom: this is also true in English studies. Crummy teachers give kids books that they must know they aren’t gonna read (Great Expectations to 9th graders!?!???) but they have quizzes, essays and assessments on file so they can easily look like they are teaching.
The difficulty we are having with high school kids, especially rural kids where i work, is that they face a not very serious dilemma: to read a 400pg Dickens novel over several weeks or print out the sparknotes or wiki on the novel and gather the same information. I mean, kids at MIT and Stanford do it. Why would students with LESS ambition do any different?
May 19th, 2010 at 4:22AM
An often-repeated cliché on math education faculty is that they are people who attempted to do math research, but failed.