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
May 12th, 2013 at 2:59AM
I made the mistake of teaching one class (a graduate class) with transparencies (back in the days when overhead projectors were still available in the classrooms). I soon regretted it, because I could sense that the students weren’t really following everything as well as they could.
Through experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the most important elements of classroom teaching is good pacing. And the easiest way to pace well is to write the most important information on the blackboard/whiteboard/tablet computer. It forces you to naturally match your pacing to that of the students (at least those who are wise enough to take notes).
P.S. My essay on speaking: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/speaking.html
P.P.S. PowerPoint sucks.
May 12th, 2013 at 9:02AM
Jonathan: Wonderful essay (plus wonderful cartoons); and your point about pacing really made me think. Most of my courses are smallish (18 – 20) seminars. Ideally there, the pacing emerges naturally, each class session, as a lively discussion develops. My function then, I think, is to keep the ball in the air – to maintain a focus on the point of that particular session even as I let the natural polemical energy of students express itself. When the pacing of a class like that has worked, you know it afterwards by the (sometimes mild, sometimes intense) brain-euphoria you feel.
May 12th, 2013 at 5:51PM
Jonathan: your essay refers to teaching computer science or mathematics. The student at Truman State University was complaining about a course in art history. It may be more difficult to communicate information about art history by omitting slides and writing on the blackboard, whatever the pace.
May 12th, 2013 at 7:36PM
Concern has been raised recently about the US military’s heavy use of Chinese communications satellites for overseas links. The reason/excuse given for this is the very high bandwidths required.
I wonder what % of the bandwidth is being chewed up by P/P presentations…
May 12th, 2013 at 11:08PM
What the student describes (decries?) could readily have been achieved in a pre-PowerPoint art history lecture using a slide projector. Don’t get me wrong – I spend a good deal of my working life combatting unthinking use of Power Point. But this particular example seems to be less about the evils of PowerPoint than about the evils of bad art history instruction.