The Times reports on that firing of an academic who showed an image of Mohammed in an art history class we talked about last month.
Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.
Let me just interrupt here to say it’s an art history class and students shouldn’t be able to impose their religious taboos on all the students in the class. Their deeply held religious beliefs should be their problem, not everyone else’s. If they can’t tolerate images of Mo then they shouldn’t take an art history class.
In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.
In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.
Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.
She’s an adjunct. Adjuncts don’t have the protections that academics with tenure have. It’s easy to fire them.
Officials at Hamline, a small, private university in St. Paul, Minn., with about 1,800 undergraduates, had tried to douse what they feared would become a runaway fire. Instead they ended up with what they had tried to avoid: a national controversy, which pitted advocates of academic liberty and free speech against Muslims who believe that showing the image of Prophet Muhammad is always sacrilegious.
But again, whether they believe it’s always sacrilegious or not, they don’t get to impose their beliefs on everyone else. If Christians don’t want to engage in a discussion of the historical Jesus and whether he existed or not, then they shouldn’t take a class in the subject. Same goes for snapshots of Mo.
A senior in the class went whining to the administration. Other students, not in the class, added their whines. The university lay on the floor while the whiners walked up and down on it.
Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.
Minnesota has a sizable population of immigrants from Somalia. Minnesota should by all means welcome them, but it shouldn’t impose their religion on anyone (including the immigrants themselves).
Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.
“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”
But lots of things are against lots of faiths. If people go out into the wider world instead of staying inside a religious enclave, they give up the power to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else.
And it’s actually not important that students – any students – feel safe, supported and respected in the sense of shielded from material that violates their tedious religious taboos. It’s actually important that students not feel sheltered in that way, because otherwise they won’t learn much.
Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.
“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”
And then used as a weapon against hapless art history professors who don’t have tenure.
Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.
Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.
Oh for fuck’s sake. No it’s not.
“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.
Zing.
The good news is she doesn’t particularly want to stay, and has job offers.
But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
The administration, after meeting with the school’s Muslim Student Association, would host an open forum “on the subject of Islamophobia,” he wrote.
Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.”
I bet David Everett loves to call women terfs, too.
At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.
…
Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.
The main speaker was Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group.
Ah yes CAIR – not so much a Muslim civil rights group as a theocratic Islamist rights group.
The instructor’s actions, he said, hurt Muslim students and students of color and had “absolutely no benefit.”
“If this institution wants to value those students,” he added, “it cannot have incidents like this happen. If somebody wants to teach some controversial stuff about Islam, go teach it at the local library.”
What an ugly and stupid thing to say. Hamline is a university, not a madrasa (and not a monastery either). Universities teach “controversial stuff” all the time – it’s an important part of the job.
Mark Berkson, a religion professor at Hamline, raised his hand.
“When you say ‘trust Muslims on Islamophobia,’” Dr. Berkson asked, “what does one do when the Islamic community itself is divided on an issue? Because there are many Muslim scholars and experts and art historians who do not believe that this was Islamophobic.”
Mr. Hussein responded that there were marginal and extremist voices on any issue. “You can teach a whole class about why Hitler was good,” Mr. Hussein said.
Again – that’s a stupid thing to say. Showing an image of Mohammed – from an Islamic tradition – is not remotely comparable to saying Hitler was good.
During the exchange, Ms. Baker, the department head, and Dr. Everett, the administrator, separately walked up to the religion professor, put their hands on his shoulders and said this was not the time to raise these concerns, Dr. Berkson said in an interview.
How horrible. How disgusting. Get your hands off me and yes it is the time, it’s exactly the time.
But Dr. Berkson, who said he strongly supported campus diversity, said that he felt compelled to speak up.
“We were being asked to accept, without questioning, that what our colleague did — teaching an Islamic art masterpiece in a class on art history after having given multiple warnings — was somehow equivalent to mosque vandalism and violence against Muslims and hate speech,” Dr. Berkson said. “That is what I could not stand.”
Seriously. Bringing in the CAIR guy just made it more like that.
A higher up CAIR guy has a much better take.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the deputy executive director of the national chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that he did not have enough information to comment on the Hamline dispute. But while his group discourages visual depictions of the prophet, he said that there was a difference between an act that was un-Islamic and one that was Islamophobic.
“If you drink a beer in front of me, you’re doing something that is un-Islamic, but it’s not Islamophobic,” he said. “If you drink a beer in front of me because you’re deliberately trying to offend me, well then, maybe that has an intent factor.”
“Intent and circumstances matter,” he said, “especially in a university setting, where academic freedom is critical and professors often address sensitive and controversial topics.”
He should have a word with Mr. Hussein.
