Opinion: The staggering mistake Hamline made is no isolated incident

[Behind the Aegis]

Well over a decade ago, I found myself teaching about abortion, eugenics, evolution, holy war and the history of the papacy at a Catholic university in the Chicago area. If you’ve been inundated with stories about the threats of campus culture to free speech, you might have expected me to have been worried. But although I had students who opposed my beliefs on every issue, I knew that at Dominican, everyone — from the chair of my department to the president of the university — had my back. If a student felt that my teaching somehow violated their beliefs and complained, I always knew that so long as I performed with integrity and care, I’d be fine. And I was, even when teaching Darwin to a creationist.

Last fall, Hamline University, a fine liberal arts institution just down the road from where I live in Minnesota, hired Erika López Prater, an art history professor, on an adjunct basis to teach a global art history class.

As reported in The New York Times, she warned students both verbally and in the syllabus that they would be shown sensitive images of holy figures such as the Buddha and Prophet Mohammed. For the class in question, she offered students a chance to leave the room without penalty before displaying and discussing an important image of the prophet made for and by Muslims in the 14th century. In other words, she performed with integrity and care.

A student complained. López Prater shared the student’s complaint with her department head, and they co-wrote an apology to the student. Hamline’s administration informed López Prater that she would not be returning to campus to teach the following semester. The Times reported that David Everett, Hamline’s vice president for inclusive excellence, described what happened in a universitywide email as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic” and that the school’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email saying that respect for Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.”

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[Tanuki]

1. Statement from the Muslim Public Affairs Council in support of the professor:

https://www.mpac.org/statement/statement-of-support-for-art-professor-fired-from-hamline-university/

"It is with great concern that the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) views the firing of an art professor, Erika López Prater, from Hamline University on the grounds of showing a fourteenth-century painting depicting the Prophet Muḥammad. We issue this statement of support for the professor and urge the university to reverse its decision and to take compensatory action to ameliorate the situation.
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As a Muslim organization, we recognize the validity and ubiquity of an Islamic viewpoint that discourages or forbids any depictions of the Prophet, especially if done in a distasteful or disrespectful manner. However, we also recognize the historical reality that other viewpoints have existed and that there have been some Muslims, including and especially Shīʿī Muslims, who have felt no qualms in pictorially representing the Prophet (although often veiling his face out of respect). All this is a testament to the great internal diversity within the Islamic tradition, which should be celebrated.

This, it seems, was the exact point that Dr. Prater was trying to convey to her students. She empathetically prepared them in advance for the image, which was part of an optional exercise and prefaced with a content warning. “I am showing you this image for a reason,” stressed the professor:

The painting was not Islamophobic. In fact, it was commissioned by a fourteenth-century Muslim king in order to honor the Prophet, depicting the first Quranic revelation from the angel Gabriel.

Even if it is the case that many Muslims feel uncomfortable with such depictions, Dr. Prater was trying to emphasize a key principle of religious literacy: religions are not monolithic in nature, but rather, internally diverse. This principle should be appreciated in order to combat Islamophobia, which is often premised on flattening out Islam and viewing the Islamic tradition in an essentialist and reductionist manner. The professor should be thanked for her role in educating students, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, and for doing so in a critically empathetic manner. "....(more)

[Behind the Aegis]

5. CAIR MN backs student who says she was hurt by instructor showing image of Muhammad

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Speaking at a news conference held by the Minneapolis chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the 23-year-old president of the university’s Muslim Student Association said: “I was shocked with a professor who gave me a trigger warning before proceeding to disrespect my religion.”

Wedatalla said she had never in her life seen a painting of the prophet. The event, she said, was “painful, for me, my family and my community.”

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Since then, the issue has exploded in the national media. More than 13,000 people have signed a petition calling for the instructor to be reinstated. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a formal complaint with Hamline’s accreditor, accusing the university of violating its own academic freedom policies.

CAIR, however, has come to the Muslim student’s defense. The organization lauded the university’s response, particularly that of its president, Fayneese Miller. Jaylani Hussein, CAIR Minnesota’s executive director, repeatedly congratulated Miller on Wednesday (Jan. 11) for working to create a more inclusive, safe and welcoming environment for Muslim students at the university.

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It should also be noted from the article: Muslim scholars say the prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad is not monolithic...

[Tetrachloride]

2. An intriguing thread

[iemanja]

3. The problem is without tenure, she has no academic freedom

Adjunct faculty are exploited, low-wage workers, and Hamline treated her as disposable.

[SunSeeker]

4. So she was fired because one student complained that there shouldn't be depictions of Mohammed?

It was an image of the Prophet Mohammed made for and by Muslims in the 14th century. It was a global art history class. How is that Islamophobic?