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 17th, 2020 at 12:58PM
“People actually said this. They said it confidently. They said it as if prefacing it Everyone knows that… As if anyone who might be thinking about demurring might want to keep their trap shut.”
In our case, the first people to say this were the ones the Provost had just hired to cram online down our throats. And, of course, the Provost backed them by saying the same thing. That helped with our keeping our traps shut.
May 17th, 2020 at 2:18PM
JND: You said it. At most schools, online was a full-court press, and woe betide the technophobic reactionary terrified disgruntled no-fun professor who said boo.
It’s been interesting for me to discover that at most schools these days the people least likely to allow laptops into their meetings and other gatherings are the selfsame throat-crammers. Wonder why.
May 17th, 2020 at 7:08PM
In his book, “Digital Diploma Mills,” the late David Noble stated that on-line content created by professors would be usurped by the institution. The image, lecture, and whatever else that was visually captured, would be used however the school saw fit, even if the teacher was no longer at the school.
A few years ago, Ed O’ Bannion, a former UCLA basketball player, sued the NCAA because his picture was on the cover of a video game, and he received nothing for its use.The courts ruled against him. He no longer owned his own likeness, which is in keeping with what Noble said would take place if unis went online. Upshot is that unemployed profs won’t be compensated for all the years of work developing their curriculum…
May 18th, 2020 at 8:02AM
What would be the difference to doing Econ 101 or business math 101 in a massive lecture hall at Central Florida, Georgia St, George Mason, ARizona St, Minnesota, etc versus doing an online course.
Out of the 60k students at Central Florida, how many of them could be identified by a single professor?
May 18th, 2020 at 8:47AM
superdestroyer: Those courses – which also typically include clickers and other distancing, anonymizing devices, and which feature plenty of students either (quite rationally) skipping, or spending the session watching sports or porn or films on their phones – are squalid jokes, and any university that thinks taking money for packing students into a degrading non-experience is okay has its head up its ass. Demolish the massive lecture buildings; offer discussion sessions only, with the organizing professor making scheduled visits to each discussion section.
May 18th, 2020 at 9:35AM
But how does the discussion groups with (?) adjuncts or grad students work at a university with 50k plus undergraduates and few graduate students?
May 18th, 2020 at 11:25AM
superdestroyer: If schools are forced to use this model, they will have to invest not only in large numbers of grad students, but large numbers of adjuncts. Otherwise, it’s all going to go online – every bit of it.