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 23rd, 2012 at 7:12PM
The other point, of course, is that students don’t really like “interactive” learning — i.e. approaches where they have to do a good deal of the work. This is less-good, if equally unsurprising, news. I’m still very much in favor of interactive learning strategies, but/and suspect that it’s easier (and hence more effective) to nudge students in that direction in a face to face classroom (preferably one with not too many people in it) than online. It *can* be done online (I’ve done it, reasonably effectively, I think), but it’s labor-intensive, in part because overcoming the resistance by some means — usually a combination of grading pretty much everything and personalized, clearly useful response to significant portions of that work — e.g. ones designed to move an individual project forward — is necessary. Maybe a very clever professor can turn clicker data, or its online equivalent, into some form of equally useful/engaging feedback, but I have my doubts. I’m hearing more and more from students that they realize that they don’t have the self-discipline to take online classes. Some can’t even handle hybrid ones. That’s a useful insight on their parts, and/but bodes ill for transferring significant portions of the university curriculum, especially the big “commodity courses,” into relatively impersonal online formats.
November 23rd, 2012 at 7:55PM
Cassandra: Yes – the whole complex business of professors as human beings whom students, let us say, respect or find intriguing or find provocative or want to emulate or want to impress or want to shock, etc. – this whole pedagogically rich human/intellectual interaction is of course simply gone in online-land.