I know! I know! Pick me! Pick me!
Uh, yes, UD?
Legitimate!!
A++, UD! We’re proud of you!
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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
October 5th, 2017 at 8:52AM
could (in different circumstances) raise the wider question of academic standards, does anyone (faculty/admin/accreditors) know what/how other people are teaching, does anyone visits classrooms to see what is being offered to students?
October 5th, 2017 at 10:36AM
I wonder if the concept of ‘implied warranty of merchantability’ might be relevant here:
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Warranty+of+merchantability
October 6th, 2017 at 5:13PM
After a faculty committee here issued a report about student evaluations that concluded with a giant tantrum about privileged white cisgendered male devils who are automatically rated as the coolest of the cool kids by even the most diverse of the oppressed youth, we are abandoning anything that smacks of a rating. Students will be invited in evaluations to reflect deeply about how the course aided their learning. Chairs, deanlets, deans, provosts, etc are not to use anything negative in these comments against a faculty member. If Jack the student says, “I didn’t learn nuttin’ in this course, and the crack the proffie sells in class is weak,” we are not to draw any conclusions. Since these comments are optional and at the end of the semester, I am sure they will generate an avalanche of thoughtful insights.
This leads into the Brave New World of peer visits, which have been rarely used by most departments here (as a dept. chair, I was an exception), but are now supposed to become important for probationary tenure-track faculty. The evaluator will take his or her standardized 4-page rubric thingie and check little boxes while observing the class. When it was objected that many of the rows on the rubric thingie don’t apply to many classes, there was murmuring about letting the evaluators pick the rows they felt comfortable about assessing. It is not clear what happens to the tenured faculty, but it appears that as hothouse flowers, we are not to be molested by the chill breeze of a mandated peer visit.
The most important part of the course teaching evaluation will be the self-evaluation offered by the instructor. We all know that people can be relied on to offer candid, clear-eyed assessments of their own performance, after all.
The short answer to dmf is that I have had a standing offer to whoever my superiors were (dean/provost when I was a chair, chair now that I am not) to visit any class they want to, any time, and it is something like 24 years since one has. The great majority of tenured faculty here are never visited, and even some probationary faculty are never visited.
October 6th, 2017 at 5:40PM
tp: The only serious classroom visits I ever read about happened at UNC Chapel Hill right after the whole Julius Nyang’oro thing broke. But that was about making sure that faculty were actually meeting their classes.. Or that classes actually existed.. It was existential, not evaluative.