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 7th, 2009 at 12:29PM
Actually, you underestimate the vast number of potential students who have been dismissed or neglected by the traditional system but who can be reached for the first time by an underwater university. This is an important way forward for the future, and the fact that you can’t appreciate that only demonstrates your own narrow reliance on unthinking tradition, and oxygen.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:37PM
It doesn’t help, of course, that "traditional" universities are making the same argument to sell their online programs, whether highly profitable, like the one at mine, or desperately-hope-to-be-profitable-some-day, like some you’ve profiled.
Newspapers are failing because while they accepted the fact their business would go online at some point, they failed to manage the transition correctly. It seems to me that the way universities are approaching these challenges is to say, well, what we do is going to go online, so the question is how do we manage the transition to that, and that’s how we’ll survive.
But why doesn’t someone sit down and say, okay, there are good things about residential colleges. (Obviously people recognize that, since a number of commuter colleges are successfully transforming themselves into residential colleges.) There is something good about the traditional lecture model. Let’s build on that. Let’s stop trying to figure out how we can compete online against companies whose sole focus is on that (outside of the few universities that are out there already and successful) – especially since our advantages of being locally centered vanish – and instead figure out how we can be better at doing what we’ve been doing for the past millenium or so. It’s not glamorous, and improvements will be incremental, but it’s the only way to challenge the threat posed by online education. But, the first step is to really believe that there is something special about lectures and recitations, and that there are fundamental flaws in online education for anything beyond fact delivery. I’m not convinced that this belief actually exists at contemporary universities.
What really upsets me is that among young faculty, no one seems to be thinking about this. (Maybe it’s because I’m in science/engineering?) I end up being on the same side as all the old fogeys (and I mean that affectionately). This is especially puzzling, because if you don’t think there’s anything special about what you do, then why would you sign on to a faculty position that basically takes you out of the running for private sector work after a few years, with the possibility that by the time you’re 50 you’ll be out of a job, tenure or no tenure?
January 7th, 2009 at 12:39PM
Rita: I have to admit you have a point. Your point holds not only for submerged students, but students scaling Everest without oxygen. Where is it written that they have to take a professor with them?
January 7th, 2009 at 12:42PM
All sorts of good points, Bahrad. Rather than respond to them (in a way, I’ve been responding to them on this blog for years), I’ll wait and see if some readers take up what you’ve said.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:36PM
Perhaps UD will have something to say in response to Harold Shapiro’s interview today at IHE:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/07/devry
January 7th, 2009 at 5:19PM
Many thanks, RJO. I’ve just read the interview — and the comments on it — and am working on a post about it.
January 8th, 2009 at 8:12AM
I used to dream of the day when every student would have a laptop. (Because I taught in a computer lab.) When that day came, I was going to hold all of my classes at the beach.
Why not learn Photoshop while SCUBA diving?
I did in fact, once upon a time, apply to a position at the University of Hawaii for almost no other reason. I can only imagine committees there throw away resumes by a lot of people like me.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:54AM
Bahrad,
I agree with you. At Kaplan, we believe that America has the greatest higher education system in the world. The country needs those campuses, in all their diversity, operating successfully. Theirs is the foundation of academic success that we all build on. At the same time, however,we must reach the people at the margin, people of capacity who, for so many reasons, are "Smart at Home and Dumb In School" (title of my current book in progress). We need them for the workforce, where we face a 7M job surplus by 2010 and a 20M job surplus by 2020. And we need them socially and civically in the country’s life. It is not an "either-or" situation. We need all kinds of successful educational practices and models, and we need to understand and celebrate each for its merits.
Peter Smith