Don's Diary

Monday. Off to the University of Luton for an interview for a lectureship in comparative politics. I quite like the idea of teaching politics to HND and mature students on a modular course, and do not object to the idea of mass higher education. I am enthusiastic, and go armed with ideas, including hot-off-the-press, technology-based case studies.

Unfortunately, I have gambled that what they need is an experienced teacher, when what they want is something else - proven track record, refereed publications, and so forth. I give an unsatisfactory answer to what turns out to be a question on student-centred learning. Why is it that something that anyone with any common sense and experience has been doing all the time, that is, trying to get students to turn up and do the work, has now been codified into a set of jargon terms and right answer? Right answer, wrong vocabulary.

Tuesday. Visit a postgraduate friend at School of Oriental and African Studies who feels overwhelmed by foreigners. We do fieldwork in the snack bar. The rich of the first world mingle with the rich of the third. All the students seem well-off, talented and multilingual. They are shocked by the idea of 15 to a seminar, and occupy the library when fines for overdue books are threatened. I sit in on a social anthropology lecture, and discover it to be a discipline in crisis, uncertain of its identity and subject matter.

Why do we learn foreign languages and go to the ends of the earth to study other cultures, they ask? Why indeed, now globalisation theory has become reality? They should spend more time in the snack bar.

Wednesday. Back to Humberside and the twin universities. The student newspaper of one institution slags off the other, alleging lowering of standards. The class war seems to have been given a new lease of life by the changes in higher education. Students have become the foot soldiers of the warring factions, willingly filling the trenches and going over the top on command.

The truth is some of the older polytechnics were always better than many new universities created in the 1960s. But who knows anything at all these days, when every other person is a professor and nobody fails. I feel I should be writing something with footnotes.

Instead, I write my standard follow-up letter to a failed interview - it would be helpful to have some feedback, as Government regulations require that I give increasingly detailed evidence that I am actively seeking work. As you know, the Government view is that those without work are unskilled, uneducated or scroungers. How do I compare with the candidate selected, or indeed yourselves, in respect to these criteria?

THursday. Sign on. I have the option of some black economy work for a PhD student. I start to worry about what to do when I get paid, since I am on benefit, then I realise, given the dodgy nature of the transaction, I might not get paid at all and start to worry about that. I do not know what to worry about first. Hold an informal conference with friends, also half in and half out of the system, on how we have ended up this way. Between us, we represent politics, French and engineering. An interesting thesis is floated. What do most students want when they are 18? They want to get laid. When is this going to be incorporated into HEFCE policy, since it is a major factor in determining subject and university choice, and the driving force behind the stampede away from science and engineering into the social sciences and humanities.

Since everybody tells me their workplace problems I seem very well-informed for somebody who does not have a job. I can hold a reasonable conversation, about the condition of mathematics in science education, the administrative procedures for NVQs in language teaching, and a host of other topics.

Friday. No word from the further education college regarding part-time teaching. I dispatch another standard letter. I consider other employment options, and dream of opening the real food cafe a friend is always talking about. Go into the kitchen and experiment with steak and kidney pud.

Nothing for it, but to try for another degree. Get out the notes for my part-time MSc dissertation on European telecommunications policy. The more I read the more pointless the exercise becomes. Everyone except the Government seems agreed that technology is the major cause of the problem, not the other way round. Perhaps the technology-based case studies were not such a good idea.

There is nothing for someone like me between lecturing at a university and working part time at Pizza Hut,to finance it. I am too qualified for a middle-of-the-road job, too old for the bottom rung of a career ladder. I look through bumf from Middlesex on a lecturing post - the statements of mission, vision and values -my heart sinks. I feel in my bones that I have no chance of employment whatsoever in an institution that promotes an equal opportunities policy. I chuck out the bumf and keep the vision statement as a souvenir.

Unemployed social scientist with a doctorate in politics from Hull University and ten years' experience as a part-time teaching assistant in Hull's politics department.