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
January 23rd, 2017 at 10:19AM
There is a third category and I’m in it. I don’t police laptop or cell phone usage because it’s beneath me and will make me feel pathetic. My students put down the phones and switch off the computers because I’m simply good at what I do and it’s more fun to listen to me than see the same old stuff on one’s Instsgram. It often happens that students actually drop their phones because they get so mesmerized by what I’m saying.
Good teaching is a great substitute for policing.
January 23rd, 2017 at 10:27AM
Clarissa: Policing has nothing to do with it. You only have to police if you have no policy. Having policies about things isn’t pathetic.
January 23rd, 2017 at 11:25AM
And, of course, the text of choice 2, second sentence, describes the dispiriting model of online degree programs.
Take heart: perhaps big time college football will follow suit, morphing into a series of online video games. But, I doubt it and that, if it did happen, the savings would go anywhere good.
January 23rd, 2017 at 12:03PM
I suspect there’s an additional reason: ‘Technology is perceived as Cool, and *I* certainly want to be perceived as cool, or at least not as uncool”
January 23rd, 2017 at 12:49PM
David: I think this one used to be in play. Tech is so everywhere now, I don’t think it’s a factor.
January 23rd, 2017 at 1:25PM
There is a third category. The school where I am an adjunct sets up the courses and we can only make minor changes. The courses often call for submitting papers for review through the computer. A majority of the classrooms are equipped with computers.
January 24th, 2017 at 11:19AM
I banned laptops this semester. I expected some push-back, but I didn’t get a single complaint. I know a lot of our contingent faculty won’t consider it because they worry it will affect their evaluations.
I had a powerpoint malfunction last week and ended up drawing a lot of graphs/charts on a whiteboard from memory. Now *that* completely changed the dynamic, much more than banning laptops. Students were far more engaged, even though I put very little text on my ppt slides.
January 24th, 2017 at 11:39AM
Anon: I’ve banned them for years and never heard a peep. I’m sure a few students have dropped the course when they realized what was up; other than that, students don’t seem to care.
January 24th, 2017 at 5:04PM
Dante, I’m sure, did not foresee Powerpoint, but I have to wonder for what sorts of miscreants such presentations would have been reserved if he had. A search of this blog would likely find a discussion, of Edward Tufte on PP (an apt abbreviation), but let me recommend it anyway:
ESSAY:THE COGNITIVE STYLE OF POWERPOINT: PITCHING OUT CORRUPTS WITHIN
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
January 26th, 2017 at 11:06AM
who could have imagined?
https://theconversation.com/its-true-internet-surfing-during-class-is-not-so-good-for-grades-70901