Goucher Mendaciously Still Calls Itself a Liberal Arts College

Curmie started his college-level teaching career in 1979. This fall, he will pass the 200 mark in total number of sections of courses taught—not counting independent studies and practicums. He has seen literally dozens of ideas and strategies (not to mention jargon) come into favor and then fade from view when it was discovered that the flavor of the month was more often than not just a re-packaged bad idea from a decade ago.

This is not to say that all changes in curriculum or instruction over the last 40 years have been bad, but roughly 1/3 are just fancy new names for what has been done for years. (Call it “acting” in a theatre class and it’s to be scorned as not really academic; call it “role-playing” in business management or law, and it’s a brilliant new approach to pedagogy.) The overwhelming majority of what’s left are demeaning (to faculty and students alike), counter-productive, time-consuming, anti-intellectual exercises in meditative bean-counting because the average university administrator lacks the expertise, the intelligence, and/or the moral courage to tell corporations to train their own damned employees or provide a few options of where politicians can shove their quantification fetishes. Our job is to prepare students to be citizens of the world, not merely workplace drones, and certainly not ovine lackeys conditioned to vote against their own best interest because the talking head on the TV said to.

In other words, after nearly four decades in the classroom, Curmie has developed a rather discerning olfactory sense when it comes to the presence of bovine fecal matter in the pronouncements of the educationists, most of whom have little to no actual classroom experience. So it was that Curmie detected that familiar aroma when reading a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It doesn’t really matter which one; they’re depressingly interchangeable. In his own personal page, Curmie posted this:

Just read another of those all-too-ubiquitous articles about how universities need to adhere more closely to their “business models.” This one concentrated on increasing efficiency and reducing costs. I’ve got an idea: we could stop throwing pots of money at consultants who have no idea what they’re talking about and who offer only two flavors of advice: the intuitively obvious and the utterly inane.

A friend commented that Goucher College has just announced the elimination of a number of majors and courses of study. Curmie hadn’t read about that yet, so it was off to the Google machine.

José Bowen: smart, wrong, and deceitful.

It turns out that Goucher is indeed eliminating majors in math, physics, religion, studio art, music, theatre, Russian studies, elementary education, and special education. Minors in German studies, Judaic studies, and book studies are also disappearing. The college isn’t in financial trouble, quoth President José Bowen, but Goucher is committed to affordability, and blah blah blah. “Affordability,” by the way, translates into a quarter-million dollar pricetag for a four-year degree. Yes, that’s before scholarships and financial aid, but even after those are figured in, we’re almost certainly looking at something well into six figures, and that’s a healthy chunk of change in Curmie’s neighborhood. (And let’s not pretend that loans qualify in any legitimate definition of “aid.”)

Goucher, of course, is exactly the kind of small college that is going to be hit hardest by politically-driven cynicism about the value of higher education, declining support for student aid programs, and unprecedented demand for superior facilities and equipment: small enough that a change of only a few students can profoundly affect the bottom line, far more expensive than state universities but insufficiently selective to make a degree from there carry immediate gravitas.

Many of these schools are scrambling for whatever enrollment boost they can find. Sometimes this results in innovation (Goucher’s justly renowned study abroad program, for example). But often it’s more of a gimmick, (e.g., the elimination of transcripts in admissions decisions). Moreover, all too often, schools like Goucher show far too much willingness to sacrifice their stated mission to achieve a short-term financial boost. More disturbingly, they can be tempted into betraying their raison d’être even when their numbers are perfectly fine; this year’s freshman class, for example, is the third largest in the college’s history.

Thus, the elimination of these majors makes no sense, even as President Bowen intones that Goucher is somehow bucking the trend to move away from the liberal arts:

Despite many competitors shifting away from a traditional liberal arts model, Goucher remains almost uniquely committed to being a modern liberal arts college. We have long resisted the temptation to adopt more of the vocational programs currently in vogue with segments of the American public. Any new programs we offer will be interdisciplinary and in the liberal arts tradition. We have chosen this path carefully and strategically.

Curmie isn’t saying Bowen is lying, but the odor wafting from Bowen’s pronouncements is strikingly redolent of the cow pasture. Because, as Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty points out, these are “programs that are considered part of any liberal arts college’s mission.” Precisely. OK, specific area studies majors often thrive until a key faculty member retires or leaves, then wither. This may be the case with Russian studies, German studies, and Judaic studies at Goucher. A thriving Philosophy department could pretty much make up for the loss of a religion major. And so on. But you can’t call yourself a liberal arts college without majors in math, physics, and the fine arts. You. Just. Can’t.

Yeah, yeah, they’re not eliminating departments, just majors, and there will still be coursework available in all of those areas of study. But it isn’t the same, and Bowen knows it. How does Curmie know? Because Bowen isn’t an idiot, however much he may be acting like one at the moment. He may be behaving like a corporate minion with neither the intellect nor the interest in education to lead a college, but he’s no dummy. Bowen is Stanford-educated, with an undergrad degree in chemistry, Master’s in music composition and humanities, and a PhD in musicology and humanities. He has a distinguished career as an educator and administrator—a little too much of a TED Talk huckster for Curmie’s taste, but certainly not without relevant skills.

It is therefore particularly disappointing that Bowen, of all people, would spearhead an effort to strip his college of its legitimacy. Because let’s be totally honest here: every day Goucher continues to advertise itself as a liberal arts college is another day it lies to its students and to the public at large. This kind of abandonment of the core principles of the liberal arts is bad enough when it happens at a place like the University of Akron, which announced it is cutting some 80 (!) degree programs, including (as at Goucher) undergrad degrees in math and physics, plus humanities courses (French, art history…). But at least Akron is up front about its priorities: it wants to become a technology leader, and to foreground programs like polymer science, biosciences and cybersecurity. Curmie doesn’t know diddly about any of those areas, but he’s pretty sure two of the three have nothing to do with the liberal arts. Curmie thinks that’s misguided, but Akron apparently wants to be in the job-training rather than education business. So be it.

Goucher, however, wants to pretend to be something it no longer has a right to claim. The major advantage of a true liberal arts education is that students can readily find their way into disciplines they had no intention of studying when they were 18. Curmie changed majors in college. José Bowen did so nine times! But if we want to get purely pragmatic, it’s simply a statement of fact that programs without majors tend to have more difficulty attracting and retaining good faculty. I think I can speak for the majority of the profession when I say that we’d rather work with people who actually want to be in the room.

Not having those majors affects the quality of students, as well.  This is—or at least should be—especially significant in areas like the performing arts, which contribute directly to the quality of life for the entire campus and indeed the larger community. Whereas Curmie has worked with a number of non-majors who have done excellent work, a stroll by the laughably horrible skits presented by the students on the orientation staff a couple of weeks ago suggests that a credible theatre program depends on students who are in fact serious about the work. I suspect this is even more true in music, especially on the instrumental side.

Indeed, instrumental music may provide an apt metaphor for what is happening at Goucher. There may be more interest in violins and trumpets, but if there’s no bassoon or ‘cello, it’s not an orchestra. Similarly, students may be more interested in economics or political science, but it’s not a liberal arts college without full courses of study in (at least) physics, math, and all of the fine arts.

To assert otherwise is to perpetrate a fraud.

Melissa Howard and the Diploma That Wasn't

There are a couple of stories about primary elections in the American southeast that have caught Curmie’s attention this week. One is serious, and plays into larger issues of securing the electoral process. I might get to writing about that sometime soon, but that’s a complex and frankly rather terrifying issue. Sometimes, you just need a story best accompanied by raised eyebrows and an ample supply of popcorn.

Melissa Howard and her fake diploma.
That’s probably her real mom, though.

And that is why, Gentle Reader, the gods have provided us with Melissa Howard, an erstwhile candidate to represent the 73rd district in the Florida House.  A little over a week ago, FLA News Online reported that Howard’s claim to have graduated from Miami University in Ohio couldn’t be corroborated. The National Student Clearinghouse lists Ms. Howard, maiden name Melissa Marie Fox, as having attended Miami in the early 1990s, but not as having received a degree.

On the one hand, it is passing strange that a political candidate would lie about something so easily proved one way or the other, but it’s just as odd that a news agency would pay to verify so pedestrian a credential: a BS in Marketing isn’t exactly going to make an otherwise reluctant voter to suddenly take an interest in a candidate. It is true, of course, that FLA News is a conservative site, and Howard’s opponent in the Republican primary, Tommy Gregory, is a more loyal minion of the NRA and in general the more frothing-at-the-mouth reactionary of the two candidates to replace current Representative Joe Gruters, who decided to seek a seat in the State Senate rather than run for re-election to the House.

Anyway, when the story broke, Ms. Howard, of course, denied it. According to the FLA News article,

She offered to send yearbook pictures and even provided a picture of her at a graduation ceremony. When FLA News asked for the one document that would verify graduation–a diploma–Howard promised to send an electronic copy but did not. She claimed it was in her mother’s storage unit in Ohio. Her campaign consultant later said Howard did not graduate in 1994, she was one credit short and later completed it in 1996. However, the campaign was unable to provide a copy of her diploma, despite four days of repeated requests.

Still, there’s not really a story yet. Getting a copy of a transcript can take a few days, and FLA News may well have been less than an honest broker in the proceedings.

But the campaign completely overplayed its hand, as with this preposterous claim:

This is just another attempt by our desperate opponent, Tommy Gregory to lie about Melissa Howard. He lied about her being a Democrat in Ohio, which the Supervisor of Elections refuted. There’s nothing he won’t do or say to hurt Melissa or her reputation within the community. It’s shameful. Melissa graduated with a degree in marketing and we have requested her transcripts from the University and have been told they take 4-6 weeks to arrive.

Anyone who knows anything whatsoever about the process of getting a transcript can tell you that whereas three or four days might be a bit short (although Curmie was e-mailed an electronic copy of his grad school transcript in a matter of hours a couple of years ago), 4-6 weeks is ridiculously long. One week, maybe. Four to six weeks (oh, so conveniently enough time to get past the primary in a safe GOP district), not a chance.  Of course, that’s for a transcript as opposed to a diploma, but a transcript would certainly have served the purpose.

Former President Obama showed a prescience one might wish had been more on display during his actual term in office, in a speech in Johannesburg at a celebration in honor of Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday.  He said:

We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they’re caught in a lie, and they just double down and they lie some more…. Let me say, politicians have always lied, but it used to be if you caught ‘em lying, they’d be like, “aw, man…” Now they just keep on lying.

Obama’s remarks were widely and no doubt accurately interpreted as a not so thinly veiled excoriation of President Trump, whose administration has indeed reached levels of mendacity hitherto undreamed of even by the most dishonest of pols. But those comments certainly apply, as well, to the likes of small-time prevaricators like Melissa Howard.

What’s important here is that her falsified credentials were completely unnecessary. Ms. Howard is a successful businesswoman, and coming up one or two courses short of graduation (which appears to have been the case) from a quite reputable university is not an insignificant achievement, and, as Zac Anderson of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune notes in a follow-up essay, “If Howard had been honest about not graduating, her academic credentials likely would never have been an issue in the race. There are other state lawmakers without college degrees.”

Indeed, it’s quite easy to imagine a scenario whereby an honest misunderstanding could have happened:

—Where’d you go to college?

—Miami of Ohio.

—What was your major?

—Marketing.

And we now have a completely accurate and perhaps even completely honest exchange which leads to a completely reasonable but completely erroneous conclusion. Well, except for the fact that Miami doesn’t have a Marketing major... more on that later.

Even after the story broke, if she’d apologized, said she had come very close to graduating but struggled with that one course (or whatever), blamed her campaign’s website’s false claim on a miscommunication with a staffer, the chances that she’d have lost more than a handful of votes are pretty slim.

But Howard, to use President Obama’s phrase, doubled down, with headline-making results. Let’s face it, she’s the best-known failed state representative candidate in the country. Why? Because of the lie? No, as President Obama said, politicians lie. It’s just that in true Watergate fashion, the cover-up was worse than the crime. Howard stalled, claimed she’d made up the missing credits two years after finishing her full-time studies, asserted that her diploma was in her mom’s storage facility, then posed with Mom and Diploma in a stratagem that was nothing if not audacious. It even worked, briefly. FLA News Online even rescinded (as opposed to “retracted”) its story.

But then university officials became pro-active. Miami, as noted above, doesn’t offer a BS in Marketing; marketing students would receive a BS in Business. But Howard didn’t, in fact, major in Marketing, but in Retailing (why would anyone sane lie about this?), which would have led to a degree in Family and Consumer Sciences... assuming she actually got a degree. Moreover, one of the signatures on the obviously fallacious diploma was that of Robert C. Johnson, who was, alas, the Dean of the Graduate School, not of Business nor of Education and Allied Professions. Oops.

Still, Howard persisted, briefly, before finally admitting she’d lied about the degree, claiming, “It was not [her] intent to deceive or mislead anyone.” Wow. She accused journalists, her primary opponent, and at least by implication her presumptive alma mater of lying about her; she staged a trip to Ohio to prove an innocence that never existed; she ultimately fabricated a fake diploma, even somehow convincing her mom to pose with it. Curmie wonders what one must do to qualify as being intentionally deceptive on Ms. Howard’s home planet.

And yet she announced she was staying in the race! Joe Gruters, the Howard campaign treasurer and presumably same person who is the incumbent in that House seat, came up with one of the great political quotes of all time. First, he said he’d urge her step aside if arrested (!), but followed it up with this gem: “in the meantime it’s a slippery slope when you start asking candidates who lie to remove themselves from the ballot.” How, exactly, is anyone to take the Florida GOP seriously after that?

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, Wait! There’s more! Of course, she lied about staying in the race, too. (Well, to be fair, it wasn’t really a lie, as she might just have been crazy enough to believe her own rhetoric.) But before she dropped out we also have an unnamed Republican political consultant saying this:

Common sense and normal politics would say she can’t survive it but everything seems to be upside down…. I wonder if people don’t feel anesthetized or insensate from [President Trump]. He set the bar so high or so low, depending on your point of view, that the stuff that used to matter doesn’t seem to matter.

When your own party’s mouthpieces start saying outright that the POTUS has so degraded normal standards of integrity that they don’t even matter anymore, it might be a portent of some serious introspection on the part of the handful of remaining Trump supporters who are otherwise intelligent adults.

Meanwhile, it strikes Curmie that there are three lessons to be learned from the Melissa Howard affair:

1. Telling the truth is better than lying.
2. When the hole is too deep, stop digging.
3. If you need a diploma forged, don’t hire someone over Craigslist..

Return to Janus VI... sort of.

Horta eggs.

In “The Devil in the Dark,” one of the more memorable episodes (as demonstrated by the fact that Curmie still remembers it) of the original “Star Trek” television series from the mid-‘60s, our intrepid heroes of the Starship Enterprise are called to the planet Janus VI, where miners of the rare mineral pergium are being attacked by a seemingly malevolent monster. There’s a fight, the creature is wounded, but it doesn’t attack when it has Captain Kirk trapped. Something is afoot! Mr. Spock does that really cool Vulcan mind meld thing on the creature and learns that it’s called a Horta, and that it means no harm. It’s just that those little spheres about two feet in diameter the miners had played games breaking open aren’t just silicon nodules; they’re her eggs, and she’d been protecting her young.

And so all is well. Dr. McCoy patches up the injured Horta, saving her life. The miners apologize for their deeds, claiming they didn’t understand the true nature of the eggs and that they meant no harm. The Horta’s babies (not all the eggs were destroyed) can mine the pergium faster than the miners can, and since they have no use for it, the miners are welcome to it, and they’ll get rich. And then everyone sits in a circle and sings Kumbaya. (All right, I made up the last past.)

Least tern eggs.

Curmie thought about this tale from over a half century ago when reading about the real-life destruction of hundreds of eggs of the least tern, a tiny bird (adults weigh only about an ounce and a half) on the endangered species list and protected (would ‘twere so!) by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The culprits were presumably beachgoers who seized their breeding ground on Sand Island in Alabama for a volleyball game. (We know this because these idiots left their net up when they left.) Yes, really.

The Audubon Society’s release on their website reads in part:

[Emma] Rhodes and [Andrew] Haffenden [of Birmingham Audubon’s Coastal Programs] found abandoned plastic tent poles, an erected volleyball net, and about 30 Least Tern eggs stacked in small piles and arranged decoratively around wide mounds of sand. Human hands must have plucked the eggs out of their simple sand nests, likely to clear the beach for a volleyball game, says Katie Barnes, coastal senior biologist for Birmingham Audubon. “It’s really hard to imagine how someone could do that to a little egg,” she says.

Around the makeshift volleyball court, Rhodes and Haffenden counted at least 100 abandoned nests—likely an underestimate, as they didn’t want to disturb the colony to get a more precise count. Each nest held one to three dead eggs that had cooked on the sand when the human disturbance forced the parents, whose bodies shield their unhatched young from the hot sun, to flee, Barnes says.

The New York Times adds that Haffendon had seen 17 boats around the volleyball net on July 4. He said “we really need to get out there”; it’s unclear why it took nearly a week to do so, although of course it may have already been too late. [Side note: the Times also reports that the least tern is not endangered, and proceeds to link to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service page, which says that it is. Thanks, “paper of record”!]

The Alabama and Janus VI stories converge at one particular point: the destruction of another creature’s eggs in an act that is simultaneously wanton and yet seemingly without malice. Certainly we are led to believe that the miners on Janus VI feel actual remorse that they unknowingly destroyed intelligent life forms. Whereas it would be a stretch to claim as much for the jackasses who  wiped out most of an important breeding ground for an endangered species, it would take a similar leap of faith to conclude that they intentionally targeted the eggs and hatchlings of a protected species.

But here is where the two stories diverge. Whereas the miners might have exercised a little more brainpower, figuring out the connection between the destruction of those spheroids and the attacks, we can forgive them for not understanding that the life forms (or at least one such life form) on Janus VI is silicon-based, so the silicon nodules they discovered might be more than they seem.

Our volleyballers, on the other hand, are the perfect storm of stupidity, arrogance, and insensitivity. Curmie will not hold it against them that they didn’t realize the eggs they dug up and arranged in a decorative circle were from an endangered species, but they sure as hell knew they were eggs, and if they couldn’t figure out that disturbing a nesting site, even to the point of interfering with eggs that had already begun to hatch, would have serious consequences for the birds in question, they’re also too stupid to understand the rules of volleyball… of course, given the fact that one of those rules is to take the damned net with you when you’re done, maybe Curmie just proved his own point.

The point is not merely that these people are proudly ignorant (there’s a lot of that in Alabama… and elsewhere), but that they just didn’t care: didn’t care that they scared off the adults, didn’t care that their actions would surely cost dozens if not hundreds of lives of baby birds, didn’t care that they might well be violating not merely the dictates of everyday compassion but federal law, as well.

And now we’re at another difference between Alabama and Janus VI: whereas the Horta knows who attacked her eggs and magnanimously forgives them, the least terns will have no such opportunity, as the possibility of ever identifying the culprits is roughly equal to the chance that Curmie will vote for Ted Cruz this November. Moreover, new “guidance” from the Trump administration last December effectively eviscerates the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (mostly to protect corporations rather than individuals: imagine Curmie’s surprise), making prosecutions problematic even if the miscreants were identified. There is no happy ending in Alabama; the best we can hope for is that the species will ultimately survive despite the insensitive human interference.

Curmie, who spends most of his life surrounded by post-adolescents, and who has witnessed a significant decline in empathy on the part of the 18-25 crowd over the last decade or two, is tempted to blame this on “kids these days,” especially when reading about the game of “beach volleyball,” a sport practiced only by the young. But a volleyball game on a beach is not necessarily “beach volleyball,” and the culprits could just as easily be a family, or a beer league softball team, or the Weekend Explorers Club at the Happy Hollow Retirement Village. And one doubts that all those boats were operated by college-aged folk.

Still, it’s kind of worth hoping that Curmie’s “kids” theory is accurate. An adult who displays this level of callousness is probably beyond hope; a teenager who comes to see the consequences of his/her actions might be salvageable. Of course, if it is teenagers and they don’t see the light, we’re stuck with their level of pathological obliviousness for a lot longer. It’s kind of a no win situation.

Maybe someday we’ll figure this whole co-existing-with-other-species thing out… but we clearly haven’t yet, and all indications suggest we’ll make only marginal progress by Stardate 3196.1. Alas.

There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.

“Never Sorry,” Alison Klayman’s 2012 documentary on Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, languished in Curmie’s Netflix queue for rather a long time. This past weekend, Curmie finally watched it. I recommend it, by the way. But the quality of Ms. Klayman’s cinematic achievement isn’t why Curmie mentions the film. Rather, what stands out right now is one of the moments depicted therein: the January 2011 destruction of Ai’s million-dollar studio in Shanghai by the Chinese government.

Ai Weiwei in his Berlin studio.

Last Friday, the very day Curmie watched “Never Sorry,” it was déjà vu all over again, as Chinese authorities razed another of Ai’s studios, this one in Beijing. Ai has also been arrested, beaten, and “disappeared” for nearly three months. So while the destruction of the Beijing studio came as a surprise, it wasn’t a shock.

Naturally, there’s an official explanation: in 2011 it was tax evasion; this time it was an expired lease (Ai had an arrangement with the landlord to evacuate the premises by August 15; the wrecking balls and jackhammers arrived on the 3rd). But literally no one believes the real reason was anything more or less than Ai’s high-profile and relentless criticism of the corrupt and authoritarian Chinese government.

Ai was never a supporter of the government that exiled his father, Ai Qing, during the Cultural Revolution. Ai Weiwei’s international fame was nonetheless a source of pride for China, and when he returned to his homeland in 1993 after living in New York for several years, he was tolerated if not embraced by the authorities. Most famously—to the average American, at least—he was a design consultant for the “Bird’s Nest” stadium which became one of the most iconic images of the 2008 Summer Olympics. By the time the Games had opened, however, he had refused to attend the opening ceremonies or to pose for photographs outside the structure: “Today is not the time to dwell on our problems, but neither should we accept those who tell us these games are not political.”

More significant in terms of his relationship with China’s hegemonic rulers, however, was his lengthy and very public campaign to shed light on the actual death toll of the devastating Sichuan earthquake earlier in 2008 and to recognize the victims and their families. The official count of casualties—just under 70,000 dead (a figure later revised to about 90,000) told a grim enough story, but Ai believed, no doubt correctly, that the government was low-balling the estimate to avoid taking responsibility for the shoddy construction of schools, which contributed directly to the deaths of thousands of children.

Ai’s international fame, like that of other artists in totalitarian regimes, served for a while at least as a buffer against persecution. That is, China knew that international headlines would ensue from any action taken against Ai, and that, in turn, would call attention to the hollowness of China’s claims to free expression and the sanctity of human rights. On the other hand, willingness to arrest, incarcerate, and otherwise nettle Ai served as a warning to lesser-known artists and intellectuals: if we can do this to Ai Weiwei without repercussions, imagine what we can do to you!

It was precisely this latter attitude that undergirds the 2011 destruction of the Shanghai studio. This time, though, it seems different. Ai has lived in Berlin for three years, and whereas he seems ready to leave that city (if he has not already done so) while maintaining a studio there, there is no intimation that he will return to China. Moreover, his direct contribution to the overwhelming majority of his recent work is conceptual: other artists and craftsmen create the actual sculpture or installation or whatever.

A Study in Perspective—Tiananmen Square

So last week’s incident in Beijing isn’t so much about Ai Weiwei himself; it’s about the art. The Beijing studio was functioning as much as a storage facility as anything else, and the reason it had not already been abandoned was the difficulty of moving the massive artworks contained therein. This shift in emphasis on the part of Chinese authorities is problematic. Certainly it betrays something of the paranoia that always attaches to any dictatorial regime. But whereas Ai’s art has quite often had an obvious political element, that doesn’t mean its subject is inherently Chinese. Thus, whereas one of his most famous works, “A Study in Perspective—Tiananmen Square,” is a photograph of the artist giving, shall we say, a monodigital salute to the site of the massacre of peaceful protestors six years earlier, there are similar photos of the White House, the Eiffel Tower, and other Western landmarks.

Similarly, @Large, a 2014 site-specific work at Alcatraz, implicates a wide range of oppressors. Mother Jones’s Shane Bauer writes that U.S. State Department officials “knew the exhibition would deal with themes of freedom, captivity, and human rights. What they did not know is that the United States would be among the many countries Ai would call out for cracking down on dissidents.”

Likewise, in the 2017 film “Human Flow” (which made the Oscar short-list of 15 documentaries but was not one of the five official nominees), Ai, in the words of one critic, “created an ambitious, humane and often shocking cine-essay on the subject of migrants and the 21st century migrant condition.” Of course, having been directly affected by the Cultural Revolution, Ai knows whereof he speaks.

So it’s not the specific subject matter of the artwork that gets Chinese authorities in a tizzy. It’s the fact that it’s art. Ai explains this position in an interview with the Smithsonian’s David J. Skorton:

I had experience in [an] authoritarian society. I realize why they hate art, why they have to censor art, why they have to control art…. Art is not [always] political, or art [does] not function as some kind of statement, but still, art has been censored in many, many nations. So what is it they are really afraid of? I think because art represents our instinct, our sensitivity, which we… still have not clearly defined by science or by philosophy.

He goes on to suggest that it is art’s unpredictability that makes it so problematic for the oppressors. “Art,” he says, “talks about human’s inner truths.” And that is always going to scare The Man… and why these petty displays of censorial power demonstrate weakness more than strength.

Ai told NPR that “any authority that cracks down on artists, journalists, intellectuals, and lawyers has completely lost its legitimacy to rule. It is evidence of vulnerability and fragility in facing the challenges of today and the future, and an inability to do so with a peaceful mind or a rational manner.”

We—all of us, from the political left, right, and center—would do well to remember these words.

*This essay derives its title from a line by Ai Weiwei in an interview with the BBC Radio 1.