Professor Nemesis

Professor Nemesis is obnoxious even in small doses, but especially so when accompanied by his own self-aggrandizement and his personal group of sycophants.  His academic fame was established back in the day, when he'd finessed a multi-million dollar research grant to come to the conclusion that people who use television as their primary source of information tend to be less well informed than people who read newspapers, and that education levels - he likes the word mediated - have a lot to do with this.

He was on all the talk shows, even Larry King.  His methodology was impeccable, indeed elegant.  I often heard him bragging about it over the din at lunchtime in the staff canteen, explaining that the data collection itself was a display of logistics that would have inspired the heart of any sergeant major.  The world owes a debt of gratitude to Professor Nemesis and this is a fact that he misses no opportunity to communicate.

            Don’t be too quick to accuse me of bitterness.  It’s just that I grew to know his classroom methods very well.  His main tactics are intimidation and ridicule and he uses both very liberally and with sadistic skill.  He speaks an ugly language, using lots of abstract nouns that activate my spell checker; nouns like textuality, discursivity, supplementarity, synchronicity, plurality.  At one time or another, I had every one of his graduate students weeping and snivelling and blowing their noses into tissues in my office over the burning humiliation they felt in his presence.

            “Why haven’t you read Goffman?” he’d thunder at them across a silent, anxious seminar table, pointing an accusing finger; though Goffman wasn’t on the reading list, only things authored, or more accurately, co-authored with earlier generations of graduate students, by Nemesis himself.