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
July 18th, 2010 at 9:25AM
Berkeley has much to lose. I’ve got a post up ( http://bit.ly/9KKuDP ) about the source and destination of NSF fellowship recipients. These are the best and the brightest in science and engineering – including social science – and where they come from and go to is telling. Note that this post only covers public universities. Berkeley far outclasses any other public research university as far as fellowship recipients – 67 – and destination – 192. Closest competition in the recipients: Texas at 35. As a destination, the next school down the list, Michigan, clocks in at 74. Quite impressive performance for Berkeley.
You can argue about university rankings, but the choices of 2000 high quality grad students-to-be is hard to blow off.
Don’t mess with success?
July 18th, 2010 at 9:27AM
San Francisco Chronicle, 1995
… All the emails and websites in the world can’t replicate the power of the in-person newspaper reading experience, and it’s hard to see how online reporting would have the same status as news written by a regular journalist. Chronicle journalists and readers are skeptical now, but in the future, everyone will be. Complaints about how online reading would destroy the reader’s pleasure and dumb down the news helped bring down a similar project at the New York Times after two years.
… [T]his endeavor could be profitable. There is also the possibility that it could be a disaster…
The editorialist reviews the growing research pointing to the distinct possibility that online reporting sucks.
July 18th, 2010 at 10:01AM
Why is it necessary for this to be either-or? Just as the traditional university uses a *combination* of book reading and in-person classroom experience, aren’t there classes that would benefit from a combination of books, on-line, and classroom?
July 18th, 2010 at 10:32AM
David,
I don’t think this “combination” is what is being talked about at Berkeley:
From SFGate ( http://bit.ly/cnpxwx )
Now the University of California wants to jump into online education for undergraduates, hoping to become the nation’s first top-tier research institution to offer a bachelor’s degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus program.
“We want to do a highly selective, fully online, credit-bearing program on a large scale – and that has not been done,” said UC Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley, who is leading the effort.
But a number of skeptical faculty members and graduate student instructors fear that a cyber UC would deflate the university’s five-star education into a fast-food equivalent, cheapening the brand. Similar complaints at the University of Illinois helped bring down that school’s ambitious Global Campus program last fall after just two years.