Apparently my baboo Adam Wheeler managed to get into Stanford after getting kicked out of Harvard! 

If his TNR résumé is any indication, the ivies must just fast-track any pretentious prick who sends an application that strings together a bunch of ten dollar words - including everybody's fave, "demesne" (it's pronounced di-MEEN, by the way, in case you want to use it in your next application to Stanford or wow them at your job interview at the literary mag) — whether they make sense in any particular order or not. 

If Wheeler's high-flown nonsense and gobbledegook was enough to gain admittance to the hallowed halls of Harvard, and then to Stanford (even after having been expelled for academic dishonesty from the former), you have to wonder what the criteria they're looking at are.  Because Wheeler's lies bordered on adolescent sarcasm.  What is it that got them to give him the green light?

What are they looking for in their liberal arts students?  Sheer priggishness?  I mean, like I've said: who would have read "Black Milk and the Stairway to Heaven: Bedros Tourian, Paul Celan, and Anselm Kiefer” even if he had written it?  Why not just dream up dissertation titles — they're like band names for brainiacs — and forget about the dissertation.  What's the point?

I don't think it's too much to say that the case of Adam Wheeler says something about the shameful state of the liberal arts.  If the ivies are this eager to admit a sham student, isn't it also, on some level, an implicit admission of a sham program? They obviously can't eliminate the arts and humanities, but have they become the Potemkin Village of the modern university?  A place of self-flattery and intellectual fatuousness for the supercilious and insincere? (I'm practicing my dissertation title, as you can see.)

Maybe they should just dump the whole curriculum and start a "Me Talk Pretty One Day" program, where you can earn a CA — a degree in Con Artistry.  Once Wheeler's made amends maybe he could chair Harvard's.  I hear he's got an impressive résumé.