composition, said "To show the film now, especially without substantial framing, content advisory and a focus on its inherent racism is in itself a racist act, regardless of the professor's intentions", and David Gier, dean of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, said that Sheng's actions "do not align with our School's commitment to anti-racist action, diversity, equity and inclusion". But according to Robert Soave of Reason, the university had violated the principle of academic freedom and showing the movie was neither a racist act nor approval of racism. Soave said that the "broader university community" owed Sheng an apology for slandering him, and compared the treatment Sheng received to his earlier experience of surviving the Cultural Revolution. Musical style At the beginning of his musical career, Sheng started out by making simplistic pieces of Chinese-Western mixtures since he had been exposed early on to both traditional Chinese music and ‘mainstream’ Western music. As his career continued, he found ways to incorporate traditional Chinese methods of music with modern music from Western influences. For nearly his whole composing career, Sheng has represented the Chinese culture he came from with the Western culture he moved to. As a result, Sheng's following has expanded from Asia and the United States to a global one. His first opera, The Song of Majnun, was written in 1992 and looked at the tensions among the styles of Chinese, Tibetan, and European music. It was based on an Islamic story but used Tibetan folk melodies. H’un (‘Lacerations’), Sheng's composition for orchestra, was written as a remembrance of the Cultural Revolution. The piece premiered in 1988 and was performed by the New York Chamber Symphony. Sheng's method of incorporating Chinese and Western methods together has been criticized and questioned. Even he himself had concerns about whether the two musical elements could be put together in a meaningful way. Some of the teachers he had advised him not to mix the two forms and to do one or another. It wasn't until speaking with his mentor Leonard Bernstein, who supported his methods to mix the two musical elements, that Sheng believed his way of composing music has become, in a way, a "new language". While still young in China, Sheng studied the history that made up Chinese music in three forms: classical, folk, and theatrical. He also looked at the history of Western music, closely studying the