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
August 12th, 2010 at 5:32PM
Well, why not have some university computer science departments actually *write some software* to meet these specialized needs? Creating a simple spreadsheet program with some integrated statistical and graphing capabilities should not be beyond the capability of a few bright students with good professorial direction. And wouldn’t it be a great resume item to say “Wrote the XYZ module for the QRS system, now used at 50 universities”? There are ways to get software other than praying and sacrificing virgins (a scarce resource on campus, I am told) to the gods of Microsoft or some other supplier.
More importantly, there is far too much thinking along the lines of: “We need to get us some technology so we look cool. Wonder what technologies are coolest right now? Oh, and by the way, I guess we need to figure out something to use it *for*.”
Michael Schrage, an interesting and thoughtful writer who actually knows quite a bit about technology and its applications, wrote the following in 2006:
“What better way to breed cognitively spoilt children than sparkly tools that interactively cater to their impatience and short attention spans? Tears of frustration are an essential part of education. The ability to press on even in the absence of simulated cooing and “isn’t this fun?” encouragement matters. But most educational software has nothing to do with cultivating character. Character does not even rise to the level of an afterthought. It is all Rousseau and no Epictetus.
This absence of character is sadly revealing. Classroom computing offers less of a bold vision than a cowardly cheat by technocrats counting on technical innovation to shield themselves from hard questions about what schools should be. That sensibility is emblematic of a monied elite that would rather buy tools than go through the painful process of determining how best to use them.”
August 12th, 2010 at 6:52PM
Or one could use free software such as gnuplot with decent graphics and statistical analysis.
As a decent alternative to Micro$, the free software package, Open Office, it runs under Windows.
Or what the hell. Use the free Linux package, Ubuntu. If we could only get our university’s IT department to support Ubuntu, we’d save everyone a lot of money.
And the students would learn a lot more…