In his weekly Takimag column, the good doctor laments the dilution of academic standards in the humanities after reading some particularly nonsensical verbiage from the keynote speaker of a conference of art historians in London.

Pretentious teachers teach pretension to new generations, who must then be found occupation to flatter their pretensions. Thus, the process is self-reinforcing and self-reproducing like a colony of bacteria in a petri dish. The only thing that will halt the expansion is the irruption of reality, for among other things, the pretension is always reality-denying.