Two thoughts:

1) There's a lot of "This could be a stretch, but do jokes like this not risk further cementing the falsehoods peddled by right-wing outlets (controlled by the actual elite) that the university-educated view everyone else as inhuman?" sort of hedging here.

It's healthy to admit that a book written by a professor named Percival that is shortlisted for the Booker prize that critics are afraid or too blinded by groupthink to criticize (the thesis of this article) might be a product by and for the "actual elite."

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2) I think a lot of this is just cheapness. The "slop" paragraph near the end gets very close to that. One thing I've realized as an adult is how hard older 20th century books were edited - sometimes to the point that if you knew the details you might think the editor was more the author that the person with their name on the front of the book.

It was like the publishers used the authors' output as raw material for the product that they were going to sell. And while that editor likely didn't have much to say about the world, they knew how to polish something someone else had done until is was a professional, marketable product, like a music producer does.

In the days of monopoly and of fear of being locked out of access to monopolies, there's really no reason to put any effort into your output. You don't have any competitors to say it's garbage; you can announce it's a masterwork before anybody gets to read it and be assured that it will be announced a masterwork when released by people who have to make a living from access.

Also, an editor who can actually create a masterwork is hard to find, and has to be trained over many years in a meritocratic system by other editors who can create masterworks. That is far rarer now, and that makes it very expensive or hard to find for any price. The qualifications for getting into almost any industry now, but especially industries that have no objective metrics for success like the arts or other elite tastemaking, are who your parents are, who you know, and if you can support yourself in NYC for years without being paid while attending fancy parties and widening your social circle. This is a filter that eliminates talent almost completely, not one that generates it. Bonus: they'll also do the job almost for free - in fact, their parents might invest in your personal project.