On the day that Columbia University capitulated its academic freedom wholesale to the Trump Administration, selling out their integrity for the price of 400 million federally funded dollars (leveraged as a threat by the Trump administration), I received an email from the head of the General Education department here at CUHK-Shenzhen:

Dear Evan, 
Could you take a look at the message and let me know your feedback? 
Best,
Department Leader

Cc’d to the email were multiple deans.

Sure thing, I thought.

I scrolled down to find the following feedback from the Chinese Minestry of Education. They had been reviewing my course materials, and found one of my texts to be an issue. Copied here is the concern:

Needless to say, this email did not increase my happiness. The text in question is Jeremy Bentham’s foundational work on utilitarianism, a text I use primarily for a single footnote, in which Bentham considers utilitarianism’s approach to the question of our human obligation to moral consideration of animals:

“The question is not, Can they [animals] reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?”

Through this I teach my students… well I teach them a lot of stuff. In any case, Reveiwer 2 felt that teaching a foundational eighteenth century enlightment philosopher was a “risk.” Articulating how silly this critique is, well, it’s so absurd it is hard to explain how absurd it is. But I tried to anyway in my response to the deans, copied here:

My hope here is this is sufficient to convince these folks there’s nothing to fear from Bentham, and any fear of Bentham is a slippery slope. That should do it, I think. Time will tell.

By coincidence, today is also the day that the 2025 World Happiness Report was published. America—the media shouted—had fallen to a record low 24th spot. China was down at the 60th position. What would Bentham say?

Reflecting on this absurd advice from the Chinese Ministry of Education flagging my course as “risky,” I couldn’t help but think that what is really sad is this silly email is nothing in comparison to what is happening in the United States right now. Universities are being financially strangled of their federal funds, students are being arbitrarily deported for participating in free speech, and the Department of Education was just canceled by executive order in an effort to create a true Idiocracy to rule the “land of the free.”

In other words: I’ll take my lot. Is it a good lot? No.
But it certainly isn’t even close to as bad as it is being in American academia right now.

不幸中的万幸
bùxìng zhōng de wànxìng

Good luck in bad luck or “Bad luck, nonetheless, good luck.”