"If you want to start taking classes at an Ivy League university unenrolled and undetected, says Guillaume Dumas, a 28-year-old Canadian, start with big lecture courses."

"If you must sit in on a smaller seminar class, it’s important to show up consistently starting with the first session, instead of halfway through the semester. Also, one of the best alibis is that you’re enrolled as a liberal-arts student. 'That's the kind of program that's filled with everything and that you expect people to be a bit weird, a bit confused about what they do,' he says. From 2008 to 2012, Dumas claims he did stints on a number of elite North American universities—Yale, Brown, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and McGill, to name a few—sitting in on classes, attending parties, and living near campus as if he were an enrolled student. This deception may sound like a lead-up to a true-crime story, but Dumas’s exploits appear to be harmless, done in a spirit of curiosity."

From an Atlantic article by Joe Pinsker titled "The Man Who Snuck Into the Ivy League Without Paying a Thing/Guillaume Dumas attended classes, made friends, and networked on some of America's most prestigious campuses—for free. What does this say about the value of a diploma?" I went to that article because Instapundit linked to it in a way that made me want to say exactly 1 thing, but now, I want to say 10 things, and the first one is the one that Instapundit, by quoting only the title, made me want to say.

1. What it says is the class sizes are too large.

2. Sitting in on large classes was, in fact, the (obvious) trick Dumas used.

3. For smaller classes, if my name were Dumas, I'd pick French Literature.



4. The author of the article stresses the lack of need for a degree, which is good news for Scott Walker. (I'm just dragging Scott Walker into whatever I can, because that's the thing now.)

5. The author of the article never addresses the ethics of stealing what others are paying for. He's presenting it as if the payment is for the "diploma" and not for all the services provided.

6. The author has interestingly misused the word "alibi." An alibi is a defense based on your being somewhere else, which is what "alibi" literally means in Latin. Dumas needed an explanation for why he was there, not for why he wasn't there.

7. Perhaps the author first learned the word "alibi" — as I did — from The Four Seasons: "Big girls don't cry/That's just an alibi." That's not right but it rhymes:



8. Speaking of the 1960s, there was a network sitcom about what Guillaume Dumas didn't actually invent. The sitcom was called "Hank":



9. Back in the days of "Hank," we used to call somebody who was doing that a "drop-in" — slang based on "drop-out."

10. You'd think the schools would do more to prevent theft of services from drop-ins, but when they are big and when they don't rely on high-level classroom discussion from prepared and qualified students, they are asking for it.