The nemesis

One of the absolute most important keys to success, which most people are too chicken to include in their self-help books, is, of course: have a nemesis.

It doesn’t really matter who they are. The most important thing is that you hate them. I mean, utterly hate them. You need to be obsessed. You need to be cursing and spitting about them all day long, and grinding your teeth over them while you sleep all night, and leaping out of bed every morning determined that today is the day that you finally make them pay.

In many ways the ideal nemesis is a figment of your imagination. In fact, if you do it right, by the time they’ve taken their place in your psyche as the true focus of all your energy and aggression, then your mental reconstruction will be so wildly divorced from the real person that they will be a figment of your imagination.

That’s the way to get on in life.

For a while I had a nemesis. He was perfect, because he appeared to have achieved everything I could possibly have dreamed of. Specifically: being a well-respected academic who did no work at all.

I discovered him one day while I was fuming after a particularly ridiculous accusation from a low-level administrator. They claimed I had invented all my student’s grades: that I hadn’t given so much as a second’s attention to their homework submissions, and had just assigned grades that were the average of their grades from all their other courses. What nonsense! The so-called evidence was that, since I had assigned identical homework problems for the last twelve years, all of the students had access to perfect solutions, and therefore my grades made no sense. A likely story.

The upshot was that I had just endured a tedious harangue from whichever third-rate academic had been coerced into the Head of Teaching role that year, and was going up to the roof to have a bit of a scream at the surrounding countryside. That’s when I spotted a door I had never noticed before.

The sign on the door read, “Dr. Jamie Bumbles”. Who the hell was he? I had never heard of him. I tried to peer in through the little window in the door, but it was covered from the inside by a piece of paper. That was obnoxious, but not unusual. What irritated me — and, I’ll admit, it was entirely irrational, which is the best way to nurture nemesis-hatred — was that whoever this swine was, he couldn’t even be bothered blocking his window with some propaganda about how fabulous his research was. Come on, man! How about a poster for a conference where you’re an invited speaker? Or a lavishly catered public talk you gave? At least a preprint of your favourite paper. Just something! Something other than a leftover printout of some dire university procedures document. Jeez!

I went away and looked him up. His “research” was some quantum woo — obviously hype-rich rigour-free bullshit of the smelliest variety. We’re talking high-profile million-view think-piece levels of grifter stench. (Why wasn’t that stuff in his office-door window? Huh? Is he just too glorious to bother bragging to us pleb professors?)

Then I dug below the public webpage surface, down to internal department reports and spreadsheets. I was briefly encouraged to discover that he had almost no actual research grants, and had been on the faculty for six years and hadn’t received a single promotion. Imagine that — the useless bastard had cooked up the steamiest of PR turds, and couldn’t use it to fertilise a single grant or pay raise. What a moron!

Then I found something that shocked me. This was what propelled him to number one nemesis status. He was not teaching any classes. He was not on any committees. He did not have any administrative roles in the department. He was not Co-Sub-Co-ordinator of Exam Review or Colloquium Snacks Organiser or even, perfect for him I’d have thought, Entirely Performative Climate Officer, whose sole job is to regularly send everyone an email telling them to turn off their computers over the weekend. He didn’t have a single one of those jobs! He had nothing!

Now my blood was starting to boil. How was this guy allowed to do so little? I thought I was a weapons grade slacker, skipping meetings and dialling in reports and delegating like a mo-fo. But he had skipped out of all the work altogether, and not even the bullshit stuff. How? How!?

The final spike in the voodoo doll of my inner toddler: he had four PhD students! PhD student allocation in our department is the very darkest of the arts. There is a complex and rigorous process of supervisor prioritisation for new students, scored against grant income, past student performance and feedback, and various other rarefied measures of professional wonderfulness. Plus, you’re allowed to cheat. And bully, and bribe. To have one PhD student is a sign of your acute understanding of how to pull the levers of power. Two PhD students means that you know where all the bodies are buried. But four? That was insane!

It was immediately clear to me that there were two things I must do. First: find out how he did this. Was it black-belt bullshitting? Was it blackmail? Or was he just very very good at slipping through the cracks? Whatever it was, I would learn his secrets.

Second: take him down.

The classic method is the scandal. I had some experience of scandals myself. Two years earlier the university had launched a formal investigation after I included in a grant application funding for a personal car and driver. I admit it was egregious. They wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t stupidly asked for a better car than the VC’s. Or maybe it was the fully costed chauffeur’s uniform? Either way, the application was queried by the funding office before final submission, and only made it through after I did a deal with the head of department for him to use the car on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They also tried to remove the funding for the driver, but that was easy to handle. I just gave them the title of postdoctoral researcher. Nonetheless, when the funding came through, there was quite a stink.

You’d think that the head of department would have been the one on the chopping block — he gave the ultimate approval — but of course he knew how to line me up as the scapegoat. I thought I was done for. Then it became known — obviously I have no idea how! — that he published a Substack of erotic fiction clearly inspired by fantasies about his own students. Now it looked like he was done for. I was relishing the chance to watch him writhing in the teeth of this mortifying scandal, but just as his media pummelling reached its zenith, a major streaming service offered him a high six-figure fee to write a TV series about a famous quantum pioneer’s notorious liaisons with underage girls (working title: Schroedinger’s C—), and he quietly resigned.

As you can see, scandals are powerful weapons, but dangerous to wield. I would have to play it carefully. It would take all of my time and energy and wits to make this work. On the other hand: what else is a nemesis for?

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To be continued, one assumes. It may not happen immediately. These things depend on the Muse. But ultimately the astounding conclusion will appear within the Professorial Substack Universe.

[Actually, it’s right here.]