It happens every year. I'm walking through the library a few weeks into the term when I hear the sound that tells me - after frosh week, after line-ups at add-drop, after the tans have started to fade - that the university year has really begun: the squeak of highlighters being pushed across textbooks.

When I was underemployed at the end of the millennium, one year from becoming either a history professor or a bartender who would tell you the history of bartending, it galled me that this magazine carried career ads telling me that, as a man, I shouldn't bother applying.

You walk into an enormous first-year psychology class of 700. It's your first day.

As the first years of the 21st century unfold, large numbers of people around the globe take for granted technological innovations that have, in a matter of only a few years, radically altered our working and private lives. They could do worse than read No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life by Heather Menzies.

As Queen's Homecoming 2006 draws closer, many people are worrying about the possible repeat of last year's Aberdeen Street riot, where a car was overturned, along with the university's reputation. For me, a Queen's undergraduate student, the worst part of last year's homecoming wasn't the physical wreckage and property damages, but the issues that arose afterwards.

Sorry, grad students, grants, grammar, geography departments, grading and graduation gowns. These are the Google years.

Investigative journalist Jennifer Washburn spent six years researching the links between universities and corporate America, and her book, University Inc. : The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education, is damning about the current relationship and the situations that can arise - situations she believes threaten academic freedom and the core mission of the university.