They defended their handling of the controversy

The Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the Hamline issue last week.

Hamline administrators, who have previously shared information mostly through written statements, granted an interview to The Chronicle. In it they defended their handling of the controversy, in which Erika López Prater, the lecturer, saw her contract go unrenewed after the course ended.

The CHE is reminding us that non-renewal of an adjunct’s contract is different from firing, because adjuncts are always subject to non-renewal of contract – they don’t have tenure. It’s a well known academic scandal that colleges and universities take advantage of that difference more and more, because it’s so much cheaper and more convenient for them.

Hamline administrators told The Chronicle on Friday that what happened in the art-history class, and their view of teaching depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, had been inaccurately reported.

But their comments raised more questions about the series of events that continues to roil the small campus.

In early October, López Prater showed two artistic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, dating to the 14th and 16th centuries, in an online session of a class on global art history. Knowing that many Muslim people object to any visual representation of the Prophet, López Prater has said she included a warning about the images both on the course syllabus and orally in the class itself before showing the pictures.

But Marcela Kostihova, dean of Hamline’s College of Liberal Arts, said on Friday that was not true. “The images were already on screen from the moment that the lecture began,” she said in a video call with The Chronicle.

Sigh. You’d think they were plutonium, or a dish of Corona virus. Anyway the CHE couldn’t verify the claim.

The Chronicle provided this version of events to David Redden, a lawyer for López Prater, but neither responded in time for publication. Hamline administrators have a student’s recording of the class and cited it to support their claims about López Prater, but declined to provide a copy of it to The Chronicle.

Why?

The Oracle, Hamline’s student newspaper, obtained a video of the same class last year, but appeared to differ in reporting what it showed: “The professor gives a content warning and describes the nature of the depictions to be shown and reflects on their controversial nature for more than two minutes before advancing to the slides in question.”

So is Hamline just lying to the CHE? I don’t know.

Miller and other administrators have said plainly that they disagree with how López Prater handled the class. Miller was one signer on an email that said “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”

Where does that end? Should respect for religious students supersede the teaching of biology, astronomy, physics? Most learning and scholarship is a rival to the core teachings of religions, so where do universities draw the line? These are two warring epistemologies, and the differences are too basic to be resolved. Religions are free to just make shit up, and then declare it to the followers without any form of evidence or argument or other reason to believe it. Secular knowledge, not so much. If secular universities decide that religion gets to silence all claims it doesn’t like, secular universities might as well pack up and go home.

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