Dear Graduates, 

As commencement approaches, I want to congratulate you on reaching this major milestone in your lives. You worked hard, played well, and learned much from your faculty, neighbors, employers and one another. Along the way, you not only have fulfilled all the rigorous requirements of your respective schools and programs; through your valuable contributions, you have helped Drexel University extend the frontiers of experiential learning, translational research, and civic engagement in service to humanity. For that I shall always be grateful.

With many more milestones for you to reach in your professional careers and personal journeys, I hope you remember that wherever you are, Drexel will always be home. 

Call home to our faculty and professional staff anytime you find yourselves seeking references, counsel and friendship. 

Make Drexel a part of your home in any part of the world by deepening your connection to Drexel’s global alumni family. Join Dragon Network (https://dragonnetwork.drexel.edu/) to take advantage of the many benefits, services and discounts available to all Drexel alumni, and to access other alumni networks around professional, cultural and personal interests. Keep in touch with your classmates with whom you have forged special bonds. Consider becoming a volunteer to mentor current Drexel students and to advise and recruit prospective Drexel students.

Make sure to write home to magazine@drexel.edu to update the Drexel Magazine staff on personal or professional milestones.

And please come back home to campus to pay us a visit as often as you can.

Again, I thank you for all that you have done to make Drexel a stronger, more innovative, more caring and more socially just version of itself. I also thank you in advance for the positive, immeasurable difference you will make at your places of work, in your creative and professional pursuits and with the individuals and communities you will be privileged to serve. What you have achieved at Drexel, and the way you have achieved it — with integrity and respect for others — fills me with hope for the future of our country.

I wish each of you a life full of joy, good health, and much success.

Warm regards,

John Fry 

President, Drexel University

It’s well-known among students that Drexel is not, so to speak, the best school in the world. “The Drexel shaft” has been a running joke for longer than I’ve been here, and it is hard to look good when The University of Pennsylvania is right across the street. CollegeCalc.org lists Drexel University at #8 on its list of most expensive schools in Pennsylvania, with an academic rating of 76 — the only school below the mid-eighties until Ursinus College down at #14. (UPenn, of course, sits comfortably as the #1 most expensive school in PA, and with an academic rating of 96.) Drexel stands as a bit of an outlier, a school that is very expensive yet not particularly great.

So what is all that money going to?

We know a lot of departments are understaffed. Take the floundering Engineering Technology department (recently rebranded as the Department of Engineering, Leadership, and Society), who had a teacher, Dr. Fanaei, leave suddenly late last year for a job at a school in Boston. The department didn’t have enough professors to cover all of his classes, so he still taught, commuting all the way to Philadelphia.

Residence halls have been seeing some updates, to be fair, but these fixes are long past due. Myers Hall was finally cordoned off this past fall, a full five years after it was originally planned to be demolished. Kelly Hall is also currently closed, getting its first renovations since it opened in 1967.

The thing is, I honestly believe that Drexel is doing a pretty good job, at least in terms of student value. Colleges need to make money. We all have our opinions of President Fry and his policies, but what’s hard to argue with is his success as a businessman. In 2021, Drexel’s endowment hit $1 billion for the first time, which is a good thing. Endowments are not bank accounts, they have specific things they can be used for, and it’s at least heartening to know that the money going in isn’t just vanishing. 

Comparing us to UPenn isn’t fair either. They’re a lot larger and a whole lot older than we are, and that makes a serious difference in academia, where reputation is everything.

If criticism is to be leveled at Drexel’s spending policy, it needs to look to the future. What is Drexel’s long-term plan, just more real estate development? How does Drexel’s reputation hold up when gentrification is becoming an increasingly hotbed issue? How long until the next incoming class doesn’t fit in the current dorms? How does Drexel truly, seriously, intend to increase academic standards?

Drexel’s latest strategic plan, “Drexel 2030,” lists some of these concerns as focus points for the university to address going forward, and describes specific actions to be taken to improve them.

The official strategic plan timeline only goes up to August of 2022. Either the plan is doing nothing or the administration has chosen not to inform us of what it has achieved.

Someday soon, Drexel will have to reckon with its overpriced, underperforming academics. Either the University will choose to invest in serious academic overhauls, or it will stagnate, and become another one of those schools where wealthy families send their C-average students. Regardless, I will not be here to see it. I only hope the correct choice is made.

To the class of 2023, 

Another year has flown by! As you all approach graduation, we hope that you are feeling excited and taking in all that you can in the final days of your undergrad experience. Like many of you, we both came to campus pre-COVID and it’s hard to believe how much time has passed and how much has changed since the days pre-masking (though the Canada fire smog has been reminiscent of those times). 

As you pack up your apartments, finish your final assignments, and spend your last few days lounging on Lancaster Walk or playing volleyball on the sand courts, we hope you can pause and find a sense of joy and achievement in how far you have come. Finishing undergrad is no easy feat, and the state of the world in the last few years has not made it any easier. Despite the challenges, you have made it, and the university community will miss your presence as you move on to your next endeavor. 

This class is prepared like no other to take on the “real” world, as we have firsthand seen the passion and drive among 2023 class members to make lasting changes not only on our campus, but in communities globally. We have had the absolute honor to work with so many of you and hear your ideas, and we wish you all the best of luck as you take the world by storm. 

Sincerely, 

Majo Garcia

Student Body President 22-23

Carlie Relyea

Student Body Vice President 22-23

Dear Class of 2023,

You did it! You made it to the finish line! Congratulations on this monumental achievement. We are so proud of your accomplishments and for making it to Commencement.

Each and every one of you has overcome incredible obstacles to get here. The challenges of

undergraduate and graduate education are tough enough under normal circumstances — but, for you, those challenges were compounded by unprecedented historical events that would reverberate throughout our society and around the world. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly shifted our perspectives regarding the typical college experience, with many of you learning for a significant time through Zoom, as opposed to on a physical college campus. 

Instead of giving up, though, each of you persevered, working hard to excel academically while still maintaining personal relationships and engaging in activities outside of the classroom. You were able to chart a new way forward in the face of every adversity, never losing sight of your ultimate goal of completing your Drexel journey and obtaining your degrees. As you stand at this moment, be proud of all you have overcome and what you have achieved. You have stood strong against impossible odds and made it through with excellence.

Your achievements and successes have stretched far beyond our classrooms to our University clubs and organizations, our many courts and playing fields, and even to the workplaces and professional environments of industry partners from around the globe. In addition, you have pushed us as faculty and professional staff members to constantly improve our systems and structures, while concurrently creating a more inclusive and equitable environment for all members of our community. We thank you for this advocacy and work. Drexel is a better place because of all of you.

I am so proud of your accomplishments and cannot wait to celebrate with all of you and your families at your college and school Commencement ceremonies, as well as our University-wide Commencement ceremony at Citizens Bank Park.

Congratulations,

Subir Sahu, Ph.D.

Senior Vice President for Student Success

The U.S. Constitution already restricts who is eligible to be elected to Congress. In order to serve in the House of Representatives, one must be at least 25 years of age, while the Senate’s minimum age for membership is 30 years. 

Some have suggested that term limits are preferable because age does not necessarily predict views. After all, Bernie Sanders and Mitch McConnell are both 81 years old but could not be more different in their political beliefs. That said, it is difficult to imagine members of Congress limiting how long they can serve. In order to enact term limits, every single member of Congress, young and old, would need to agree to limit their ability to run as fate allows. That is not going to happen.

Age limits are not about cognitive ability, as many older members of Congress have much mental vigor. Rather, such restrictions would empower voters to decide who represents them. Incumbents, with their name recognition and reserves of campaign money, have a strong advantage over any challengers. In the 2018 Senate election in California, incumbent Dianne Feinstein’s democratic opponent, Kevin de León, lost by almost one million votes. A sporadically vacant Senate seat has resulted due to Feinstein’s poor health. She will be 90 years old in a few weeks. With age limits, Kevin de León might have won that Senate seat. In any case, California would know they have an effective senator.

One out of three U.S. senators is 70 years of age or older. Some argue that these individuals could always lose a primary or general election, but it is often not the case. In order to ensure fair competition in the marketplace of ideas, it is imperative that age restrictions be put in place. If members of congress will not vote on this then Americans could push for a constitutional amendment.

Polls have shown that Americans support age restrictions on members of Congress by a nearly 1 to 3 margin. It is rare for 75% of Americans to agree on anything in today’s polarizing political climate. Voters are in agreement. The passage of maximum age restrictions would prevent senators in “safe” seats from waiting until their death to give up their congressional seat and allow the next generation of leaders to stand up and advocate for change. If the maximum age of eligibility to be sworn into congress were set to 70 years old we would still in theory have members of congress in their mid-70s. The idea that our elected representatives deserve to hold on to power until death is one fueled by the egos of the people we choose to represent us.

The Democratic senator from the state of Washington, Patty Murray, has been in congress since 1993. It has been 30 years since the people of Washington have had an opportunity to choose who represents them. At 72 years old, Patty Murray will likely stay in her seat for another 15 to 20 years. Senator Murray is a perfect example of why the lack of age restrictions has limited choice in the state of Washington. Her goal is most likely to die in office in the hopes that she will receive a massive funeral in a similar vein to John McCain. Her name recognition and cash supply will prevent her from losing in a primary. She will never lose in a general election due to the heavy partisan lean of the state of Washington. By the time the people of Washington are given the opportunity to choose a new senator there will be voters who were born during Murray’s first term who will be celebrating their 45th birthday. Half their life will have been represented by just one person who has almost always been guaranteed victory.

Americans deserve an opportunity to choose their elected representatives. It is time to demand age restrictions on members of Congress in order to increase competition in primary and general elections. Americans love choice, but that is not satisfied when so many members of Congress would rather die in office than stand down for a new generation of leaders. Senator Feinstein’s three-month absence from the Senate resulted in a backlog of judicial appointments in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The next Ruth Bader Ginsburg who could someday rise to the Supreme Court may be denied confirmation because of one senator desperately clinging to power. The people who will suffer the most are the people our representatives claim to care about.

Frank Sinatra and his everlasting charm still dwell among us, 25 years after his death. His voice is alive and well, enchanting listeners in all contexts.

Be it at romantic dinner, during a wedding reception, at a cocktail party or as a movie soundtrack, Sinatra’s songs transport listeners back to a time where the intermingling of tunes, instruments, and vocal cords that characterizes his style was the music of the day. Though the technicality of his art can be clearly pinpointed to a time in history, the content of his songs are just as relevant today as they were during his lifetime.

Born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the son of two immigrant parents from Genoa, Italy, Sinatra was a prodigy. Sinatra’s mother left a profound impression on him from a very young age. Although quite firm and at times even harsh, Natalie Della Garaventa had an unparalleled drive to always be better, as Sinatra put it. This can serve as a clue as to why he always strived for perfection in his art, which to him felt attainable through hard work.

Based on testimonies given during the “Sinatra: All or Nothing at All” documentary, Sinatra despised the middle ground, gray areas, and being “good enough” was never, in fact, good enough to him. He had to be immaculate in everything he did. He was as meticulous about his appearance as he was about performing his songs. He dedicated the same amount of care to his craft. While Bing Crosby was the one who introduced the concept of conversational music to mainstream culture, Sinatra picked up on that and successfully expanded in a way that became a lot more personal. As Tony Bennett, a good friend of Sinatra, shared, you could live Sinatra’s life through his performances.

Yet Sinatra’s shows were much more than beautiful melodies. How he transmitted the songs and emotions was just as important to him. Bennett’s account of his performances is that “he was the two masks of the theater — the comedy, the tragedy. Underneath it all, he was a very very sensitive, nice person.” Seemingly theatrical yet still real and relatable, Sinatra played what struck many as a versatile character, yet the true wonder is that the character was never truly divorced from himself. On stage, everything seemed perfectly controlled.

There is no question that Sinatra, who missed the births of two of his children for work purposes, prioritized his career over his family responsibilities. He also was caught up in several scandals involving his personal life choice as they pertained to his marriages and divorces. Despite all of that, whenever at home, Sinatra was loving towards his family and had the reputation of a charitable man, who would always go out of his way to help others when needed. During his acceptance speech for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award delivered at the 1971 Academy Awards ceremony, Sinatra shared that “if you don’t know the guy on the other side of the world, love him anyway, because he’s just like you. He has the same dreams, the same hopes and fears. It’s one world, pal. We’re all neighbors.”

David Hume disclosed in his 18th century philosophical piece “Of the Standard of Taste”, that he believes in several steps that, if followed by those trying to make judgements of taste, would lead to much more intersubjective agreement on what constitutes great art than one would initially think possible. One of his four tests was the test of time which he saw as serving the purpose of distinguishing from the momentary appeal of certain instantiations of art to everlasting value. In his own words: 

Authority or prejudice may give a temporary vogue to a bad poet or orator, but his reputation will never be durable or general. When his compositions are examined by posterity or by foreigners, the enchantment is dissipated, and his faults appear in their true colors. 

Frank Sinatra sets a high bar for posterity, as evident through his songs that continue to delight and inspire us to live a life meant to be lived.

The Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu once said that:

The only real things, the only things we take with us, after all is well and done, are our own feelings, our loves, our passions, our sorrows and adversities. I wonder: we, at the end of our lives, what would we leave behind? I guess we would leave some feelings. Maybe a little hate, some passion, but… love especially. 

Frank Sinatra still lives through what he left behind: some passion, but love of music, especially.

It’s a good thing the universe is so big (and probably a lot bigger than we know), because it is so full of violent action, from subatomic particles in collision to galaxies millions of light-years wide ramming each other, that we need all the space we can get. Our baby planet has endured its share of it, routinely from cosmic rays that pass harmlessly through us to asteroids that can reshape continents, exterminate species, and alter climate for millions of years. There’s no such thing as a quiet day on Earth, and once in a while the fact is forced on our attention, as from the big shake that tore up southern Turkey and northern Syria a few weeks ago. Fortunately, we have a lot of time too, and with luck we can get through the short span of a human life or a civilization with a certain sense of continuity. We depend on recurrent cycles called seasons that sustain the complex event called life, no two quite alike but sufficiently similar to enable reproduction and growth, and the individual terminus called death. Time, of course, is relative: some species live a day and others for thousands of years. Each fulfills its own sense of the cycle, aphids have one and elephants another. We humans have our own. 

Homo sapiens, if growing to maturity and living out its programmed biological span, seems to have been planned to live for about forty years, long enough to reproduce and nurture its young. That was the cycle shared with other creatures. Instinct, as we call it, told them when and how often to propagate to maintain the species population. But humans, creating their own environments, could create and experience different cycles too. The biggest such creation to date has been agriculture, which tied humans to the soil, created new social relations, and ultimately civilizations. That occurred near the beginning of what we identify as the most recent geological epoch, which we call the Holocene and date from about 11,700 B.C.E. The Holocene coincided with the end of the so-called Ice Age, a period not favorable to agriculture but one which forced small groups to shelter in caves and may have contributed to the socialization processes that made agriculture possible, including the invention of art — the first imaginative reshaping of the human environment.  

Humans were about a million in number at the beginning of the Holocene. By the mid-seventeenth century C.E., they had reached a billion, an extraordinary increase for a sizable mammal. Now, we stand at eight billion, with the average life expectancy in more advanced societies roughly doubled. That population appears to have stabilized in certain places, but continues to rise in others. It has already risen enough, however, to reconfigure much of the planet’s surface and to extinguish or radically diminish many of the species on it. Given that we are only beginning to understand the interaction and interdependence of life forms in the ecological whole, we have little comprehension of the likely effects of this on the planetary balance. Until now, the species balance has been reshaped by the creative and adaptive changes we call evolution, about which we as yet know little, and occasionally by catastrophic astrophysical events. For the first time, however, a different factor has come significantly into play as well, which we self-flatteringly call human intelligence. We have introduced species variants through breeding, and are on the cusp of creating new ones altogether through genetic manipulation.

More evident than what we may create is what we have already destroyed. The scale of this destruction, known and unknown to us, is already so large that Elizabeth Kolbert, in The Sixth Extinction, places it among the half dozen greatest die-offs known to geological history. Such events have typically been caused by periods of volcanic eruption, oxygen impoverishment, or increased carbon dioxide load. Carbon dioxide, largely produced by human activity, is the chief culprit of our present crisis, which includes recurrent episodes of extreme climate events. We know these are man made because extinction periods typically last into the millions of years. The species extinction rate in our present crisis is tens of thousands of times faster than in any other known era. The only factor that could produce this effect is humanity. The activity responsible for it is industrialization, including agricultural industry and nuclearized warfare. Of these factors, of course, nuclear warfare has the greatest potential for mass extermination in the briefest period. An all-out nuclear war could devastate the planet within hours, although its longer-term effects would unfold slowly and of course agonizingly. No nuclear-armed power has as yet renounced its arsenal with the exception of Ukraine. The result has not encouraged others to disarm.

At present, scientists are debating whether to recognize a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, as superseding the Holocene. Some would place its arrival with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century; some with that of the Atomic Age in 1945. It may be, however, that capitalism deserves the honor. Market economies long precede industrialization, and mechanized production the advent of nuclear weapons. What distinguishes capitalism, however, is its ceaseless quest for concentrated wealth — capital accumulation, as Karl Marx described it in the nineteenth century. Earlier social elites expressed this drive in terms of the possession of precious metals, whose rarity made them desirable. This rarity made them translatable into the objects and symbols of wealth —landed acres, great palaces, prized works of art. Possession was one mode of exhibiting this wealth, spectacle and display another, consumption beyond need or private enjoyment yet another. Finally, the reduction of wealth to its barest token, negotiable paper or plastic, a thing of no value or utility in itself, became its ultimate signifier, the nothing that represented everything (Bitcoins, with their arbitrary conditions of production and the immense expenditure of energy required to create them, may be seen as the attempt to restore materialization, and with it the image of labor that, according both to Marx and Adam Smith, was the only true source of wealth).      

The reduction of the market from the exchange of actual products and services to their mere monetary symbols has come to be called financialization. As a symbol, it is infinitely extensible, but at the same time, susceptible to precipitous devaluation — the boom and bust cycles characteristic of the capitalist “market.” After World War II, Hungary’s currency, the pengo, fell to a trillion to the dollar, and so ceased to be a medium of exchange; in 2023, there is talk of our federal government minting a trillion-dollar coin to forestall a default on its securities. There is, in fact, no relation in either to actual value, but only to the relativized abstractions of less and more. What capitalism wants is, simply, more. And that more, applied to the limited and interconnected resources of our actual world without limit or restraint, is what, wittingly or not, is bent on destroying it.

When the nature of Donald Trump’s war on democracy had become clear, the full catastrophe of the 2016 election was evident: a political party in disgrace, simultaneously the captive and the embodiment of a clownish demagogue; a campaign openly subverted by a hostile foreign power; a presidency determined by a minority of the popular vote through a system dating from the eighteenth century. The result, four years later, was a violent attempt to overthrow the Constitution led by Trump and the nation in crisis.

Trump’s attempted putsch on Jan. 6 failed narrowly, but only because the boob in him overcame the would-be despot. You don’t stage a coup d’état by watching it on television with a cheeseburger in hand. But the lesson to be learned was that a cleverer and more focused figure, exploiting the open conspiracy that has systematically undermined our public institutions for the past half century and more, could succeed where a flatulent narcissist had failed. That figure is already here in the person of Ron DeSantis, the now twice-elected governor of Florida. If DeSantis does not win the Republican nomination for president next year, he will be the odds-on favorite to do so in 2028. He has already replaced Trump in one regard: he is the most dangerous man in America, certainly as far as higher education is concerned. More—and I do not say it lightly — he is one of the most vicious and evil.

The ultimate bulwark in a democracy is its system of public education. It isn’t perfect, no institution is. But it is where a nation’s diversity meets, which is why the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools be desegregated is justly regarded as among the most consequential ruling in its history. What schools teach varies with the climate of the times and the state of knowledge. But what they properly inculcate is tolerance, respect, and freedom of thought, speech, and action. Those things are what makes democracy work. Stifle them, and you cut democracy off at the root.

That is exactly what Ron DeSantis is trying to do. He went after curricula he didn’t like and encouraged the purging of books he decided should not be read. After denouncing so-called “woke” culture on Florida campuses, he chose an easy target, New College, a small school, originally private, that had been chartered as the state’s designated residential liberal arts college. The College’s excellence was undoubted; in one year, it provided four of the state’s six Fulbright scholars. It didn’t please DeSantis, though, who purged its Board of Trustees and installed a controversial president whose provost, Jason Speirs, suggested to the new Board that it summarily fire the entire faculty. Now, a similar model is being applied to the state university system as a whole, which educates the vast majority of Florida’s higher education students. As is customary with DeSantis, his proposal begins blandly enough: new faculty hires are to be made by Boards of Trustees on the recommendation of school presidents. This is the way tenure-track hires are made, with the president’s recommendation to the Board being made on the basis of a lengthy consultative process beginning with the recruitment of candidates by the faculty of academic departments and going up successive levels to the president and the Board, which is normally pro forma. In DeSantis’ formula, however, the Board may delegate the power of recommendation solely to the president, retaining itself only the power to accept or reject his choice. This means that the power of faculty appointment remains in the hands of the president and the Board alone: “the president and the board are not required to consider recommendations or opinions of the faculty of the university or other individuals or groups” . In plain English, a president working in concert with a Board may hire faculty at pleasure, representing any conviction they prefer. If, as Provost Speirs suggested, they may also fire anyone they please, and if the state governor may restructure trustee boards as DeSantis did at New College, then he may exercise personal control of the entire university system. No dictatorship could work more simply and directly. Trump, passing automatically on judges presented to him by the Federalist Society, could not be bothered with such detail. DeSantis, the graduate of Harvard and Yale, would never be satisfied with less than full power, not over a single arena but, as he has shown, every aspect of public life: not a demagogue, but a tyrant.

Well, dangerous, but vicious and evil? A story that has recently emerged about DeSantis’ own years working for the Judge Advocate General’s office in the Navy shows an even more forbidding talent: that of a torturer. When prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, held without trial for persons denounced as terrorists, went on a hunger strike early in their detention, DeSantis was assigned to protect their rights. As one of the strikers later testified, he gave him the following speech:

“I have a job. I was sent here to break your f—— hunger strike. I do not care

why you are here, I don’t care who you are. My job, sir, is to make you eat.

Today we are talking. Tomorrow there will be no talking.”

There was no talking. The strikers were tied to chairs and force-fed laxative-laced Ensure through the nose as they screamed, bled, vomited, and defecated. Observing this, DeSantis smiled, laughed, and gave every sign of pleasure. The Navy, asked about this, said they had no record of his conduct. The prisoners’ memories, years later, were vivid.

This is the man who is now governor of twenty-two million Floridians, America’s third largest state. He is the man who would be president of the United States. If he were, he would certainly have a job to do, and he would undoubtedly have a thorough way of doing it.

What does Gov. Ron DeSantis have in common with Herman Cain, Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean and Jeb Bush? Every one of them was a top candidate for president a year before the Iowa caucus in the year they were running. Early polls give us an idea of who could potentially break away from the pack, but unfortunately for the front-runners this usually makes them the target of relentless attacks on their policies from opponents. Being a front-runner a year before voting begins is almost never beneficial. Being in first or second place in the polls makes you the target of attacks from other candidates who also have a chance at becoming the party nominee. In 2020, the Democratic party had several front runners. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders all held first or second place positions in polls leading up to the Iowa caucus. None of them became the nominee.

For DeSantis, his feud with Disney and continuous attacks from the Trump campaign have resulted in a slow but steady drop in the polls. Donors have pulled support from his campaign, and politicians from his own state of Florida have endorsed other candidates. This includes recent endorsements for Donald Trump by a large number of US House members from Florida. If Ron DeSantis chooses to enter the presidential race this year, he will be attacked by both the Trump campaign and the campaigns of other hopefuls who are vying to be the Trump alternative. It would be wise for Gov. DeSantis to realize he is not in as strong of a position as he thinks and avoid entering the race.

Gov. DeSantis does still have an opportunity to run for president. The 2028 race is an opportunity that may be more appealing. He will no longer be governor at that point due to term limits, and he can focus 100 percent of his time on running for president. It is difficult to know what Trump’s standing in the Republican party will be at that point, but it is no doubt better to be on his good side in the current political climate. If DeSantis were to run again in 2028 after challenging Trump this year, he would be attacked repeatedly by Trump and his allies. If he chooses to run for president this year, he will only be embarrassed as his approval slowly drops. Unfortunately for Ron DeSantis, his early lead in the polls may be the very thing that sinks his presidential aspirations.

In Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, the United States Supreme Court is deliberating how to assess whether the appropriation of a work of art is protected under the fair use doctrine. This is a highly consequential case as the ruling is expected to have far-reaching implications for visual artists, writers and industries that rely on the works of others.  

While in some instances it is reasonable to think of appropriation as a form of theft, when it comes to art, the subject of copyright laws begs a more nuanced interpretation of how artistic creation emerges. For example, how often is it that a work of art is fully original? Many times, works of art share elements that can easily be traced to the creation of an earlier artist. The more one thinks about it, it is only natural that as time passes by, the breadth of creative content out in the world grows larger and larger leading to either the conscious or unconscious decision of some artists to incorporate past ideas or traditions into their work. The important question is — where should we draw the line between a fair incorporation of past ideas and stealing? If the Supreme Court Justices decide to rule in favor of Goldsmith and use a more rigid interpretation of the fair use doctrine, this may lead to an increase in frivolous lawsuits over copyright law, as seems to be the case in the trial between Ed Sheeran and Marvin Gaye. Nevertheless, the Goldsmith case is complex and its facts deserve proper examination.  

Lynn Goldsmith photographed the music performer Prince in 1981 as part of her job at Newsweek magazine and allowed the Vanity Fair magazine to use the photograph in one of its 1984 editions in exchange for a $400 license fee. The picture used in the Vanity Fair article was edited by artist Andy Warhol in his distinct rebellious style, heavily reliant on pencil illustrations and silkscreen prints. Warhol continued to create and license illustrations of Prince using Goldsmith’s portrait without notifying Goldsmith. 

Defense lawyer Lissa S. Blat and Prosecutor Roman Martinez are addressing the question of whether Warhol’s appropriation of Goldsmith’s picture constituted fair use, so the real question for the Supreme Court is how to determine fair use. When assessing fair use, courts have historically asked four questions: Is the new work transformative in the sense that it adds a new message and meaning vis-à-vis the original work? What is the level of transformation? What is the type of work involved? Does the new work negatively impact the market of the original work? 

The disagreement between the two parties, as exemplified by Martinez and Blatt’s claims during oral arguments, seems to be over whether the transformative question is relevant for a fair use analysis. Martinez, defending the Andy Warhol Foundation, stressed that the transformative analysis is crucial and that neglecting it “would make it illegal for artists, museums, galleries, and collectors to display, sell, profit from, maybe even possess a significant quantity of works.” Arguing in favor of Goldsmith, Blatt raised serious concerns about the subjective nature of the transformative test and the larger effects of adopting such a standard. 

Disregarding the transformative criterion for the fair-use analysis seems like a bad idea. Eleven copyright law professors submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court for the Goldsmith case arguing for the inclusion of the transformative test for an “orderly development of copyright law … that serves the public interest.” When asked by the Harvard Law Review to comment on the implication of the case, copyright professor Rebecca Tushnet discussed how interaction with copyrighted material is crucial to the development of the arts and to societal innovation at large given that “copyrights have never been pure monopoly rights.” Martinez stressed that precedent works in his client’s favor and flagged that “a ruling for Goldsmith would strip protection not just from the Prince Series but from countless works of modern and contemporary art.” 

Martinez and the copyright professors make a good case. Apart from the extreme unpleasantness of being involved in a frivolous trial, this may also deter artists from engaging in production of art. Moreover, if the ruling goes against the Warhol foundation, it will most likely be the case that this will disproportionately affect emerging artists who lack the necessary financial means to participate in legal suits. 

Blatt’s arguments appeal to those concerned with how easily manipulated the transformative test can be. For example, Blatt argues that if someone merely adds a smiley face to someone else’s painting, it would be unclear whether that would be transformative enough to count as fair use. While that may be the case in theory, I argue that in practice the transformative test appeals to common sense and that there is more intersubjective agreement on whether a piece of art is transformative than one would initially expect. Additionally, getting rid of the transformative test altogether does not seem to help determine fair use. The reason why the test was accepted in the first place was to help offer more context when interpreting copyright laws.   

While the issues of copyright and licensing and how to properly protect artists against fraudulent reproduction of their works while still encouraging artistic innovation are complex, getting rid of the transformative criterion in the interpretation of what constitutes “fair use” may create more problems than it solves. Regardless, the decision is highly awaited by many who look to the Supreme Court for more clarity on how to understand and apply copyright laws.