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
November 7th, 2011 at 2:47PM
That column was part of a Power Point Counterpoint last week Wednesday. The affirmative case is also available online: http://northernstar.info/opinion/columnists/article_fe0f45fa-05bf-11e1-ba4f-001a4bcf6878.html
Read it carefully, as the author might be suggesting that prepared slides make unprepared professors more organized.
November 7th, 2011 at 4:26PM
Perhaps PowerPoint, like a repressive political regime, brings forth good writing.
November 7th, 2011 at 8:34PM
I was an undergrad in the pre-Powerpoint days but if one reads enough complaints about bad teachers today (who happen to use a lot of Powerpoint), one could begin to imagine that all of my bad professors 30 years ago were also bad because of PP.
I use PP in my classes but I also give a lot of myself. My students definitely get more than if they had just bought (and read) the book. The concern for good teaching we see on University Diaries is always a good thing but the equating of any use of Powerpoint with bad, lazy, contemptuous teaching is not in line with the generally thoughtful analysis we see here.
We have 25 tenure-track faculty in my department and I could take you to the lectures of the two best teachers and the two worst teachers in the group. The good ones will engage students, add extemporaneous stories, follow up when questioned. The bad ones will be uninterested in the students and their problems, not look for ways to add to the lectures, and be generally no fun to listen too. The one thing that they will all have in common is PowerPoint.
November 8th, 2011 at 10:56AM
“Prison of perpetual powerpoints” is nice, but seriously, UD, you are endorsing “The only reason why I can think you, professors, rely on PowerPoint presentation is because you are lazy”? The student can’t even think of such reasons as: because his classmates demand PPT, because classes are too large for abstract discussion, because arranging real-life experiences is expensive in time/money/labor to students, professors, and departments, because students don’t read the text, etc, etc, etc. Sure, I’ll accept that doing nothing more than repeating the textbook in your lecture is bad teaching (although, I could also argue that it’s reiterating important points that may sound familiar but that students do not necessarily know how to identify what they should emphasize for themselves). But attacking the tool instead of the teaching just undermines the piece. Good persuasive writing tackles counter-arguments.
And what in the world does it mean to “learn best…logically” as opposed to visually or verbally?
But all kudos for “But when all you do is read verbatim off the PowerPoint that is verbatim from the book, I do not call you a professor. I call you a thief.” That’s nice. Too bad the argument isn’t at the level of the rhetoric.