The employer’s religious preferences
The Washington Post tells us Erika López Prater is suing Hamline.
On Tuesday, attorneys for the professor, Erika López Prater, served Hamline with a lawsuit that, among other claims, alleges religious discrimination and defamation by the school. López Prater, through her lawyer, and Hamline University declined to comment on the lawsuit Wednesday.
The religious discrimination issue is interesting. It is religious discrimination to punish people for not obeying the orders or rules of a religion. It’s religious discrimination to act as if one’s own religion is binding on everyone else.
At a news conference on Jan. 11, CAIR’s local Minnesota chapter described the incident at Hamline as Islamophobic.
The chapter’s executive director, Jaylani Hussein, said that showing images of the prophet Muhammad is offensive and that most Muslims around the world oppose public display of the prophet’s images.
That right there – that way of thinking. That’s all wrong. People can oppose public display of whatever they like, but that doesn’t mean we all have to pay attention to their opposition. I’m betting Jaylani Hussein thinks it does mean that.
Religions shouldn’t have a Right to Censor that applies “around the world” and without question. Religions are not the boss of us.
Minnesota law appears to take the same view.
López Prater names the trustees of Hamline University in her lawsuit and alleges, among other claims, religious discrimination under Minnesota’s Human Rights Law as well as defamation.
Redden said state law protects employees whose employment suffers from not conforming to the employer’s religious preferences, or if the employee “doesn’t comply with the religious-based discriminatory preferences of their customers.” In Hamlin’s case, the customers are the students.
And the students don’t have a right to veto classroom content on religious grounds.
A senior and the president of Hamline University’s Muslim Student Association (MSA), Aram Wedatalla, was in the online class when the photos were shared, according to the Hamline Oracle.
“I’m like, ‘this can’t be real,’” Wedatalla told the Oracle. “As a Muslim, and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”
Bollocks. What respect does she show them that corresponds to her censorship of an art history class? How is it respect to force her religious taboo on all the students in that class? Especially when López Prater warned the class in advance and said students who didn’t want to see the images of Mo could step outside? Wedatalla could have stepped out but didn’t, so clearly she wanted to force the taboo on the entire class. I don’t call that “respect.”
H/t Sackbut
I cannot accept that “feel like I belong” is paramount. There are other places to find community. Do you “feel like you belong” in math class, or geology class?
“They don’t show me the same respect that I show them.”
-I insist they all follow the tenets of my religion, therefore… I agree to follow the tenets of their religion?
Sometime after Aram Wetadalla recites the Credo, she can ask her teachers not to show pictures of Mohammed.
Something I’ve tried to find out, but without success, is what Fayneese S. Miller’s academic qualifications are. Is she primarily an administrator or has she published anything of significance? Does anyone know?
I find this at Mitchell Hamline School of Law:
I don’t know if it matters, but I think that Wedatalla is a Somalian, and in the Twin Cities, they have become a powerful and welcomed minority group. This is a weak reason to claim he doesn’t feel like he belongs.
I don’t understand how a person imagines she is entitled to feel like she belongs everywhere. Why would anybody think she can go anywhere she likes and say “stop what you’re doing here, because I feel like I don’t belong here?”
Does anybody bust into the Muslim Students Association and say “I feel like I don’t belong here, so you have to change what you’re doing?”
If you’ve chosen to follow a (sect of a) religion that is fundamentally incompatible with academic freedom, then you feeling unwelcome some places is an indication that you live in a free society. If you are trying to end that, then perhaps you should feel even less welcome.
Seven books? Amazon seems to know only about one of them, Transforming Learning Environments: Strategies to Shape the Next Generation, a snip at $149.99. (By contrast, it knows of three of yours, Ophelia, and you can buy all three in hardback for comfortably less than $149.99). There are no reviews, so I can’t tell how well received it has been.
I wonder about these “many articles” too, because Web of Science couldn’t find any. However, that may be because searching for “Miller F” gives a vast number of hits, and I didn’t go through them, and “Miller Fayneese” doesn’t give any at all. Is there a list anywhere, or at least a selection?
#5. My impression is that Wedatalla is a woman, but I could be wrong.
Interesting. There is the helpful “or monographs”…maybe Amazon doesn’t carry monographs. Strange that the articles can’t be found…
It must be difficult to get away with just claiming articles that don’t exist in academia though, no? With all those rivalrous competitors watching everyone’s every move?
When I noticed that she has a second initial of S I thought that searching for “Miller FS” might be better, and so it proved. Of 74 hits 72 were clearly not her (I don’t suppose she was writing about succinate dehydrogenase in 1964). That left a book chapter that has never been cited, and a journal article. Unfortunately I don’t have access to either without paying. There are at least two sites that allow one to read Transforming Learning Environments: Strategies to Shape the Next Generation for free, but both require registration and I don’t feel inclined to let myself in for an endless series of emails.
Well, as George Santos has shown us, you can get away with the most blatant lies, at least for a while, if no one checks. There is someone on a news group that I frequent who has a Marquis Who’s Who entry that claims he has articles in Science and Nature. When I said that I couldn’t find any of these he initially ignored the question, but after a few repetitions he admitted that there are no such articles.
Well thank you for the due diligence. It’s disturbing that Mitchell Hamline School of Law didn’t bother.
I’ve been on search committees (okay, only one, because the administration would rather not have me on search committees so much that they lied and said there were no science faculty available when they hired a new person to the science faculty with no one from science on the search committee).
In our case, we had what the applicant gave us. We called references, but that didn’t give us much. When one of the references was the fiance of the applicant in question, they didn’t care. The school hired her anyway, and ignored all of the discrepancies in her application. That was the one they wanted, that was the one they would hire. I was the only one on the search committee who cared. Now you see why they don’t choose me on search committees?
We hired her for her ‘statistical’ knowledge. She had none. She didn’t have any math background. She downloaded a presentation off the internet, gave it for her talk, and impressed the committee. She couldn’t do her job without the internet on hand. So what?
I will admit, this was for a sustainability coordinator, and the last thing they wanted was for her to actually know what she was doing and make changes that count.
I’m not certain a group of barbarians that think cutting bits off their little girls is acceptable or that throws a hissy fit over art *should* ever belong… Leave that shit back in the hellhole you came from and be a proper citizen.
what I am confused about is this art appear to come from South Asia or the Middle East??? So Muslims made the art? Why should one sect or tradition be priveleged?
Yes there’s plenty of disagreement among Muslims about this issue. Why should the most theocratic faction be privileged? Fear, probably. The liberals aren’t going to kill you, the fanatics are.