Don's Diary

SATURDAY. The weekend before the start of the spring term. Drive to Warwick for a conference on Ben Jonson. Intellectually stimulating, it has been organised by a graduate student who has invited most of the best Jonson scholars in the country and some from abroad. As always I am astonished at the sophistication and drive of graduate students, and embarrassed that we offer them so few career opportunities. Over dinner discuss the relative merits of the Internet. Having spent much of the previous month jumping around the world on Netscape, I wax lyrical about its possibilities.

Certainly it will mark the end of the academic journal as we have known it. Others are sceptical. Is it really worth the time invested ploughing through reams of trivia?

SUNDAY. Miss the second day of the conference as I have a huge backlog of marking (as always) and, crucially, I want to think through my week's teaching as the department is to be visited by the Teaching Quality Assessors. Pass the day feeling like a patient in a dentist's waiting room.

MONDAY. Arrive at college early to make sure our TQA paperwork is in order. I have been part of a team of three who have spent the past two months assembling documents and preparing for the exercise. The cost has been that none of us has done any research since October, but then the research exercise is next year. We spend a couple of frantic final hours and by midday we stand, like proud Frankensteins, admiring our assemblage before leaving it to its (and our) fate. The quality assessors arrive. They seem human.

TUESDAY. Morning meetings with the assessors to discuss our structures. We are worried that Birkbeck's difference - exclusive teaching in the evening to part-time students in full time work - will not be appreciated. Actually, the assessors seem to have a good understanding of this and discussions go well. In the evening teaching proceeds with its usual intensity. As I am about to go off to one of my assessed BA classes, I meet a colleague returning from one of his with a catalogue of disasters: students had not received his reading list before Christmas and were unprepared, his seminar felt like teaching a group of dead cats while being observed by an animal rights inspector. I am now more nervous than ever. But students are wonderful. They have all done their reading, most talk, the discussion is of high quality, the assessor asks me if they are MA students. I finish at 9 pm. and walk back in pouring rain to the main building with the assessor and think: "I work a long day at Birkbeck".

WEDNESDAY. Early hours. I dream I am a lecturer in a department of anthropophagi studies which is being quality assessed. They particularly like the practical exercises the students do and feel we have exemplary resources in shrunken heads. "Some may question whether such a degree is appropriate to the needs of modern Britain, but this is not for the assessors to judge", says the lead assessor as he declares us excellent. With a 50 per cent increase in graduates over the past five years despite diminishing staff numbers, we feel this is deserved, particularly as several of our students now practice anthropophagism.

Wake up. Real meetings with assessors. In the afternoon go to the centre for English studies to hear a paper on George Herbert by a visiting American. Afterwards, I try to explain to him and a Dutch colleague the nature of quality assessment. "But what is the value of the assessment if there are no consistent intellectual criteria for the judgements made?" one of them asks. "If claims for excellence are largely self-determined by the department making them, what does 'excellence' mean to a student looking to see if the department she wishes to study in teaches English to a standard recognised by Harvard or Amsterdam?" I have no answer.

THURSDAY. TQA result is excellent. Particularly like the part about fostering a dynamic intellectual community. We drink a few bottles of champagne (the gift of a former student); yet feel anti-climatic. All agree with the assessors praise and criticisms, but they are aspects of our practices we are already aware of. Besides the label, there are no resources following the assessment. Will the college reward us? Will they feel we can do more? My lasting feeling is of results wholly disproportionate to the effort involved. If one thing has challenged the department's teaching quality over the last four months, it has been TQA.

FRIDAY. After a week without consulting the Internet, I discover I have 132 messages from three Renaissance listservers I subscribe to. It takes me an hour to go through them and discover large number of items about: the Republicans threat to the National Endowment for the Humanities, whether nuns performed as actresses in early modern Europe, a newly unearthed Renaissance tract dealing with a syphilitic monster called Gordon (surely this can't be right). There are also a number of complaints about the trivia on the net. I decide to unsubscribe from two of the servers. Turn to a huge backlog of marking. The conclusion of the first week of term, and it feels like the end of the tenth week. Still, I end it certain that I can still distinguish fantasy, cyber-reality, and reality - virtually certain that is.

Thomas Healy

Senior lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, London.