Excerpt: A Haphazard Arrangement

(2) Humor

The artists had been on strike for almost a month now and no one had noticed. The leader, Yeong Park, issued a statement to the university officials stating that their strike was a symbolic move to bring attention back to what he called the “creative sciences,” a coin termed by notable Art History professor Dirk Wheaton in his essay “The Arts Aren’t for Sale.” Yeong and a coalition of fifteen students carried signs (acrylic on canvas) and marched around the center of campus for two hours each day from noon until 2 PM, shouting that the recent funding cuts in the art departments were a restriction of freedom of speech, a violation of the Equal Education Act, and a harbinger of more cuts to humanities departments across campus. Most humanities students knew this to be true but in the interest of staying on the good side of the university funding officials, slyly side-stepped their picketing brethren on the way to class.