A fond farewell

to my favorite Chronicle blogger, Marty Nemko, who published his last post as a guest blogger yesterday:

This is my final post as guest blogger and I must say that many of the responses demonstrate what’s wrong with higher education. . . For example, commenters called me, not just my ideas, for example, “off the deep end.”

But Nemko was not discouraged:

I was struck by how the negative comments, even the ad hominem ones, rather than demotivating me, motivated me to try even harder in my rejoinders and in subsequent posts. That reminded me of all the people who say they were unmotivated until someone said, “You can’t.” or “You’re a loser.”

Please don't leave us Marty Nemko. At least not until the fall when the academic year starts and I have something else to write about. In fact, I dare you to keep blogging for the Chronicle! I bet you can't! You're a loser.

Conversing with lesser humans

The Chronicle's new blogger, Marty Nemko, on how elite, educated people can communicate with the unwashed common folk:

I disagree with [Deresiewicz’s] contention that being elite-educated makes you incapable of talking with uneducated people. . . If you make the effort to keep your speech clear and concise, ask about things the person is likely to care about: e.g., family, friends, the Red Sox, and listen carefully, you’ll do fine.

Examples:

Do. . . you . . . have . . . a fam-i-ly?  

Do your friends also work at the gas station?

How bout dem Sox?

Oh for fucks sake

Today, my new favorite blogger at the Chronicle, Marty Nemko, finds the real lesson in Tim Russert's death:

Tim Russert’s untimely death from a sudden heart attack reminded me of the dramatic 50+-year-long gender disparity against men in health care research and outreach.

Nemko claims that "for the past 50+ years, the overwhelming majority of health care research has been on women’s health" citing as evidence:

. . . when I searched PubMed . . . I found 22,304 articles with the keywords “women’s health,” but only 586 
with “men’s health.”

Holy crap... 97% of all medical research is about tits and ovaries? Now that is alarming... so alarming that you almost wonder if there is some huge and obvious logical flaw in his argument...

A sad day for whitey

The Chronicle's new guest blogger, Marty Nemko, writes about attending a graduation for masters students at SFSU where white men were marginalized, cruelly excluded and made to feel unwanted at their own graduation:

I wondered how the straight white male graduates must have felt. . . I wondered how many, in their heart of hearts, felt sadness or anger at being excluded.

How were white straight men "excluded"? According to Nemko, all of the speakers were minorities -- except, well:

the retiring chair, a white man who said that his vision for the counseling department is to create a program in counseling the incarcerated, disproportionately minority.

Race traitor!  And:

... [a] professor handed out four student awards: three to Latinos and one to a white male who had been transgendered and did his thesis on transgender counseling.

And whites who are queer don't fucking count.

I am bookmarking this guy as I'm sure that more delightful insights are ahead.