“Don’t head off into town and spend a fortune on weekend-priced drinks, when you can come to your very own union instead. New this term: fantastic, better-than-ever drinks promotions – trebles+mixer (incl Red Bull) for £2.50 – new DJ line-up, stilt-walking, stage dancers and fire performers.”

This rather desperate promotion for the Newcastle student union bar tells a story. Those who look back fondly on an old-style university education may remember passing long hours in a union bar offering perhaps little more in-house entertainment than hard chairs, cheap beer and intense conversation.

Fire dancers forsooth, older readers may shriek, surprised at the efforts that have to be made to lure students into the bars that are provided for them nowadays.

No sign of open diagnosis on children’s hospital

FAST forward to 2012. You might be aware that this is the year London hosts the Olympics. It is also when the east of Scotland ‘s new children’s hospital is scheduled to open its doors. A shining palace of health, it will be a place where those who come to be treated will be children first and sick second.

Perhaps it will also have a shiny, blue, two-storey helter-skelter like London ‘s new children’s hospital, the Evalina, which was recently visited by a focus group from Edinburgh.

“We don’t want a cheap box, we want something that is really outstanding, that has a wow factor, ” says consultant paediatric surgeon Bill Manson.

“If you are selling off your sociology textbooks to a second-hand dealer, you are probably better to say they are cultural studies. You will get a better price.”
This admission by William Outhwaite, a professor of sociology at Sussex University, is an indication of the sliding status of the subject. Once the most glamorous of subjects, the leftwing equivalent of a Swiss finishing school, sociology flourished in the second half of the last century, particularly at the postwar universities and the polytechnics. But the wave of expansion of higher education is leaving sociology departments stranded, and many report that it is more difficult to attract undergraduates.

I believe I speak for others at the Herald when I say I am utterly heartbroken and furious at the massacre of our once great newspaper. This whole issue is about far more than the fate of one group of newspapers. It affects us all in Scotland.” This cri de coeur posted anonymously on the allmediascotland website was prompted by news that one of Scotland’s two quality national newspapers is facing its third round of budget cuts in three years, this time to cut the annual budget by between £2m and £3m. One hundred jobs will also go from the three titles, the Herald, its Sunday sister and the Glasgow Evening Times. The Herald had been set a target of making 39p per pound for shareholders and, because it had fallen short, cost-cutting was deemed necessary – management had even asked staff for suggestions on how to save money.

While schools in some parts of the UK debate the issues surrounding burqas and niqabs in the classroom, Scottish educationists have their own human rights dilemma, centred on Twixes and Caramel Wafers. When a headteacher and school board attempted to ban sweets in packed lunches at an Edinburgh primary, some parents objected and the education authority forced the school to back down.

“Captain, the engines cannae take much more” – the catchphrase of “Scottie” of Star Trek was based on the stereotypical, highly trained Scots mechanic. Albeit in a futuristic guise, this was the kind of chap that in days of yore Dundee Technical College prided itself on turning out. The college, founded in 1888 for the training of mechanics, as shown in the stone carvings on the front of its original home, moved on to navigation, which explains the ship’s bridge that stands on its roof. Now, reincarnated as the University of Abertay Dundee, it specialises in biotechnology and computer games. It was Abertay that trained the creator of Grand Theft Auto.

Morag Henderson found her time at university very hard. A single parent of two, with no supportive ex-partner on the scene, no money and mild dyslexia, who left school with few formal qualifications, she says: “I thought about dropping out all the time.”

Verena, a German student serving delicious apple soup at Aberdeen University’s volunteer fair trade cafe, doesn’t do e-books. “Screens give me a headache. I love to read books and I write on paper.” Whether people like Verena are technophobes who will be left behind by the gradual evolution of the library into the “e-brary” is not yet clear.

A boy tries to light dry grass under a pyramid of twigs. Eventually, it catches and he lies on his side to blow the embers into crackling life. Tonight he and his friends will dine on a thin stew made of thistles and heather leaves, cooked over the fire. They will sleep in a makeshift bivouac on a bed of ferns.