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
October 6th, 2010 at 10:23AM
and then the question arises: why do they attend class at all?
October 6th, 2010 at 10:55AM
@ Tenured Radical:
First, so they can honestly say they attended x percent of classes and earned their baccalaureates. (If anything, exploiting students’ delusions is common in higher education.) And second, (pardon the aged colloquialism) it’s to get their meal tickets punched.
October 6th, 2010 at 11:16AM
How much money is really saved by these huge 250-person classes? A little back-of-the envelope analysis:
If we put the fully loaded cost of an instructor at $200K/yr (probably high, given the percentage of starving adjuncts, etc) and (s)he teaches 10 classes a year, then the total instructional cost per class is $20K **if** we allocate the total cost of the instructor to teaching. (Not reasonable if (s)he is also doing research, especially funded research.) Under these assumptions:
–If there are 250 students in the class, the cost per student is $80
–If there are 50 students in the class, the cost per student only goes up to $400
–If there are 30 students in the class, the cost per student is a diabolical number, $666
Pretty small differences in cost, it seems to me, given the difference in interaction that will occur, especially between the first and the second case. Pretty small differences in cost, too, in the context of total cost spent per student per year.
Any obvious holes in the above?
October 6th, 2010 at 9:33PM
An order of magnitude difference in per student cost and you think this is a “pretty small” difference? You must be a physicist.
October 7th, 2010 at 7:21AM
Shane…I’m not a physicist, but rather a money-grubbing business guy. “Order of magnitude difference” in cost of one aspect of a system needs to be considered in the context of cost of the *overall* system and of the value that the particular aspect contributes to that system.
I’m pretty sure that there are components of the iPhone and iPad that could have been cost-reduced by an order of magnitude-say, from $4.00 to $.40–and that a considerable part of Apple’s success lies in the suppression of internal proposals for such cost reductions.
I also feel pretty confident that there are aspects in the typical university’s cost structure that could be cost-reduced with much less impact on value than increasing class size from 50 to 250.
October 7th, 2010 at 8:43AM
Continuing the previous thought…I suspect there are many university administrators who, if hired by Apple in a fit of insanity and put in charge of the iPad product line, would ruthlessly cost-reduce the device itself—thicker, heavier, lower screen resolution, much slower–but then spend more than the savings by including an extremely fancy hand-made leather case. Which would not be optional–can’t get the iPad without the case.