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
December 4th, 2010 at 4:36PM
A lot of universities on that list are heavy into engineering. I still don’t think there’s much correlation between these sorts of evaluations and amount of student learning. The peer-reviewed suggests that also. They might be useful for detecting verbally abusive, or unprepared professors but they are not able to detect ones that dismiss classes early, cancel assignments, grade easily, or entertain at the cost of material coverage. I’ve seen all of that with professors that pass them off as masterful teachers. True evaluation of teaching requires peer review.
December 4th, 2010 at 4:50PM
I’m not sure, Red Stater. Peer reviews, in my experience, tend to produce rather bland results… I think students are far better judges of professors than are other professors. No one watches me as closely, day after day, as my students.
Peer reviewers show up for one or two class days — it’s the students who are there to notice a professor chatting into her cell phone during class; not showing up, or showing up late, consistently; falling asleep during student presentations; showing one film after another; letting grad students teach the class, etc.
I’m not sure of your point on the subject of engineering. There’s certainly no reason it can’t be taught well. It’s not intrinsically dull.
The scandal for me, reading through RPI evaluations, were several professors there with rock-bottom scores — 1.1 all the way across, with thirty or more students scoring them, and with consistent, repeated descriptions of their classroom behavior. These professors have been teaching for decades, and some of them are teaching courses that students in certain majors have to take — there’s no way to avoid the professor. Failure to remove such people from the classroom shows contempt for your student body.
December 4th, 2010 at 8:06PM
I seriously doubt there are 300+ schools with better professors than the ones I had in my undergraduate days at William and Mary. I’d have a lot of skepticism about those rankings.
December 4th, 2010 at 8:13PM
GTWMA: Of course you can’t take these results very far – I agree. In fact, one doesn’t want to make all that much of RMP itself. My point about all of this has always been that it’s useful only when there are really dramatic, well-documented results — when you have forty students, one after another, complaining with very similar details over at least five years about a professor.
And it’s simply very likely to be true that those universities which, in the ranking at issue, show up in the top ten “worst” category, are, at the very least, troubled.
December 4th, 2010 at 9:28PM
I sit on review committees and our College of Engineering professors typically have the lowest evaluation scores. The highest? — College of Ed. (ugh, don’t let me go there) So it didn’t surprise me that universities heavy in engineering were on that list. The other bothersome observation is that some of the lowest rate professors by the students are those from Europe or Asia. Their expectations seem to be higher than Americans. I speak only for the STEM areas. Their scores seem to go up after a few years and it isn’t because they’re teaching more material. I know, I discuss this with them as part of their annual review.
Engineers including those in the education pipeline have the most critical attitudes. That’s perhaps because of the nature of their work (life and death in some cases). The engineers I deal with (I’m not one) are uncompromising and not sympathetic, you either are cut out for the discipline or please move on. The work load on the students is among highest in my university. I sit in on lectures, and judge my colleagues and will write up what I think. I certainly judge them on how well their students are prepared for my classes. I find some of the highest rated professors by the students have the lowest preparedness for my courses. That’s not just my university. This was confirmed by a peer reviewed study just published on student evaluations at the Air Force Academy.
Simply put, in my situation, I would rather have students from monotone professor X’s class with student eval scores of 4/10 than highly entertaining professor Y’s (score = 9.7/10) populating my 4xx class in advanced whatitmycallit.
I read RMP reviews of my colleagues and myself. Sometimes they’re fair. But more often for those critical ones, they don’t have seem to have much semblance to what the professor expects in terms of requisite knowledge and development of critical thinking skills. Demanding professors are often berated. To my highly rated colleagues more than a few are simply nice, or are more entertaining than erudite and when their students get to my classes, they’re overwhelmed with catch-up work. On the other hand, I have a couple that are highly rated and I trust in terms of student preparedness. There’s not a negative correlation, but there’s almost zero correlation. I wish it were positive, then we have the magic formula for measuring teaching success, but we don’t.
December 4th, 2010 at 10:09PM
Absolutely, Red Stater. I hear what you’re saying. There’s a vast category, in RMP, involving genial, amiable, adorable, A’s for everybody, folk. Their ratings are high, but they’re probably pretty worthless teachers.