When Academic Freedom Collides with Students' Personal Beliefs

Parents Forum
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Below is a gifted article discussing how an art history adjunct professor was asked not to return after she had shown an image of the Prophet Muhammad in her class, despite having given a warning in the syllabus and prior to showing the image in that class. Although her department chair had initially said the adjunct had done everything right and would back her, when the association of Muslim students complained, the university, in its efforts to make all students feel welcome on the campus, terminated the adjunct’s contract.

A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job.

(Link should be good regardless of your NY Times’ subscription status or number of articles read this month.)

How would you suggest a disentanglement of academic freedom on topics with legitimate, academic value from populations who feel threatened or marginalized by the topic? In this case it was an image of the Prophet Muhammad, but for others it might be classes on general topics (i.e. surveys of U.S. history, English lit, etc) that feature books with a greater emphasis on LGBTQ populations’ topics/protagonists, or a study of propaganda with inclusions from Nazi Germany, or a study of texts that contain any racial epithets, etc.

As parents, would a school’s position on such an issue (whether you agree or disagree with the position taken here) influence your willingness to pay for your child to attend the institution?

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These are really important questions to be asking! I don’t know the right answer, it seems so complex, although my initial bias is to be on the side of freedom of speech. As a parent, I don’t think a school’s position on such an issue would affect my willingness to have my child attend, as long as the fit was good and it was within our budget.

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First of all, here is an excellent article by an Islamic Art scholar that is food for thought: An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad - New Lines Magazine.

To answer your first question, I don’t know.

To answer your second question, I willingly paid to send my kids to a parochial school that taught “values” with which I disagreed. They were in middle & high school when they started school there. The school taught science without removing sections that the denomination may have found troubling, so I found the education itself to be complete. It was their stance on several hot-button topics that I didn’t agree with. My kids knew exactly where I stood on those topics 
 they were able to critically analyze the discussions and make their own conclusions. Both have very carefully considered opinions - neither was brainwashed, even before the age of 18.

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I’m on the Freedom of Speech side as long as it’s announced ahead of time to students, etc, just as this was, and not a required class.

My kids are past college age, so my thoughts on paying for it don’t matter, but yes, I would steer away from schools that did things like Hamline. IMO, this professor was set up by the student who complained, then the others who jumped on board. The University let the professor down making them the scapegoat.

I don’t want a world that’s a theocracy even though I have strong religious views myself. Those views guide me in my life. They don’t apply to others who haven’t chosen my path.

If a college has a Prof teaching something as true that is “absolutely factually incorrect” (like Flat Earth), then I have no problem with them being dismissed. There may be a few other lines I’d support too, but theocracy is not one of them - even if it’s my faith being dissed.

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Interesting that the institution is Hamline. This is a regional university that last was in national news due to the opposite problem: the administration defending the academic freedom of a professor who held an unpopular opinion (a law professor who argued against the practice of indefinitely committing the “criminally insane”–violent rapist/murderers–to secure psychiatric facilities after they had served their sentences.) ETA: but I see there is a new president now.

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To be clear, I answered that “I don’t know” the answer to question #1 because I don’t 
 but any speculation I have will verge on political, so I am just not going there.

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I suppose it’s only fair that I should try and answer my own questions as well.

Ugh, this is a messy one, I fully admit. Personally, I think that the art teacher followed a good methodology in terms of giving warning on the syllabus and prior to the reveal in the class. If a kid had objected, then perhaps the kid could have studied an alternate image, either one not depicting Mohammad or one where Mohammad is veiled (as in the link from @kelsmom
a solid white veil so that no facial features are seen). Something equivalent, kind of like schools that have kids do either an online dissection or study the anatomy of an animal from books rather than doing an actual dissection.

But that’s a relatively “easy” case when the topic is art history, so a different artwork could potentially be substituted that had similar characteristics (i.e. from same geographic area, time period, and techniques), and perhaps similarly true for a literature class. But for subjects like history
those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. And even if one doesn’t like a certain behavior/group, that doesn’t mean one should remain ignorant of it. And one of the purposes of college is exposure to new ideas and concepts. Challenging one’s beliefs can often be how one grows (and I’m not referring just to some of the hot-button topics). And for many colleges, their mission is often about expansion of the mind, and so to let certain students not have some of the same experiences
so should a person from an evangelical family be able to avoid reading The Color Purple because of how LGBTQ relationships are portrayed because of their religion? Conversely, should LGBTQ students be able to avoid readings that show negative depictions/comments of the LGBTQ community? (And feel free to replace LGBTQ for something about one’s race, religion, immigration status, or other protected status.) If so, then where does it end?

So yes, a mess. I am obviously somewhere in a circular pattern of thinking and welcome the sharing of other viewpoints. Tagging some people who I think have some academia-ties: @dfbdfb @ColdWombat @2plustrio, I’m sure there are others.

Our family is committed to public K-12 schooling, so the question for us really applies to college. I don’t think that Hamline’s fumbling, bumbling response here would be enough to eliminate it from contention with respect to our willingness to pay, although it would certainly be an area of concern. If there were repeated violations of academic freedom similar to this by the same institution, then that college might get nixed.

I will say that I would have tremendous difficulty paying for an institution that blocked academic freedom in a reverse way. If the institutional policy & culture was such there were never any positive mentions/representation of historically (or currently) marginalized populations, that would pretty much be a deal-breaker for me. If forced to choose, I’d prefer an institution that denied academic freedom in favor of marginalized communities than against them. But I’d obviously prefer neither and would be willing to pay more if that was the only way for it to happen for our kid.

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If the department chair backed her, shouldn’t it be the department chair that should have resigned if backing her was a mistake?

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I’m assuming this one’s not actually directed toward me and is more of a rhetorical/philosophical question for the forum to respond to. But here are some additional excerpts that reference the department chair and her actions.

Ms. Baker, the chair of the digital and studio art department, responded to the email four minutes later.

“It sounded like you did everything right,” Ms. Baker said. “I believe in academic freedom so you have my support.”

The support, as far as it seems to have gone.

As Dr. López Prater predicted, Ms. Wedatalla reached out to administrators. Dr. López Prater, with Ms. Baker’s help, wrote an apology, explaining that sometimes “diversity involves bringing contradicting, uncomfortable and coexisting truths into conversation with each other.”

A couple of weeks later, the university rescinded its offer to teach next semester.

At a forum in December when a religious professor asked:

“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.

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.

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In any organization, it is often power that wins over principle. At a college, adjunct faculty are expendable and powerless, unlike the chair in this case who is a tenured professor who would face a highly competitive job market to find a comparable job elsewhere.

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I understand reality of course. It was more a question of integrity.

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To me this is an open-and-shut case. The professor gave MANY warnings. Don’t want to see the art? Then don’t attend that class session. She gave students an out. Many times, including up to the minute before she displayed the artwork. The professor was entrapped by the student for political point-making.

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I do tend to lean pretty far left, and I generally support professors having cultural sensitivity. That being said, I think that the university is clearly in the wrong here. I think that the students, who is the president of the Muslim Student Union, attended the class with the objective of being insulted. Otherwise she would have spoken to the professor before the class, since it was stated clearly on the syllabus that there would be a depiction of Muhammad, and one from a Muslim text, no less.

I think that you are being generous. I see it as the president is trying to score some cheap points at the expense of one of the most vulnerable of her faculty. The student is trying to score cheap points by playing the victim while attacking somebody who is far more vulnerable than her.

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This is one of the most egregious cases of administrative cowardice I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if there’s anything Hamline can do to regain my good opinion. If you’re a regional liberal arts college and you show contempt for the liberal arts, what are you good for? It’s not like students attend for the sake of the shiny Hamline brand name. If you don’t want to educate students, just shut your doors and quit wasting everybody’s time.

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I agree, and it won’t bother me a bit if we see their name in the Colleges that are Closed list soon.

The prof was set up by the student and the college didn’t do their job.

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What do you think these “points” they have scored might buy them, and with whom? Very seriously, I am willing to consider the idea that the student and/or the president did this deliberately, i.e. were looking for an opportunity to be publicly aggrieved. But I’m having a hard time imagining why, as in what benefit would it confer either?

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Hamline is a school I am biased towards rooting for, having lived near the campus at one time, and having been a guest lecturer (not an adjunct) a couple of times.

Like a lot of regional schools, it has undergone a lot of transformations in its years. It was the first university in Minnesota, the first coeducational university, and hosted the first intercollegiate basketball game ever (it actually used to be a national basketball powerhouse!) It used to be a school that attracted middle class and wealthy families, but the surrounding neighborhood became low income, the school did not move, and over the years it became a school that educated a lot of lower middle class, working class and poor families. The most recent incoming class was 47% 1st Gen, and 44% non-white (which is a high percentage in Minnesota.) It has an excellent social mobility rating.

It educates the children of a lot of immigrants, kids where it is not unusual for their grandparents not to be able to read, and sometimes their parents too. I don’t know their exact level of Muslim students, but it is relatively high, as Minnesota has a big Somali immigrant population. In my experience, this population is not looking to be offended, but they come from a background that is devout and not sophisticated or worldly. They are not the sort of people that (unlike the Duke professor’s family) would ever know about or collect medieval Islamic art. I believe it is possible that the student who complained truly was shocked by such a thing. It was an online class, and if she participated in online learning the way I have seen kids do (while simultaneously watching TikTok) she easily could have missed the warning slides.

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I basically agree. I don’t think the professor did anything “wrong”, and I disagree with the university’s actions.

For something like a scientist teaching evolution or round earth, there’s no alternative. In my freshman evolution class in college, the atheist prof was snotty and rude about religion. This was a very religious student body. However, he did say that students weren’t required to “believe” in evolution, but would have to be able to answer the questions correctly on the exams. On the other hand, our textbook had a beautiful chapter dedicated solely to this topic and treated it with such grace. It included quotes from all sorts of clergy and did a great job of respectfully laying out the logic of how someone could be devoutly religious but also fully accept the truth of evolution. The contrast between the professor’s words and the book’s words served as an example for me.

I grew up in an area totally dominated by religion A, but I was a devout member of religion B. That strongly shaped me. Although I am now an atheist, I am very cautious about religious stuff with people. I will staunchly defend the members of religion A when I hear people mocking them. I won’t defend their church, but I will defend the individual members. Outsiders think they are stupid, but they don’t understand what it’s like to grow up that way. I know how it feels to be in the religious minority and it is a unique experience.

Many super religious folks cannot separate the core of themselves from the religion and if you attack their religion you strike their core sense of self. I’m not saying it’s right, but I try to respect that when I can and tread carefully. There is no progress I will achieve from making that kind of wound to someone. I’m not going to convince them of the truth of evolution by telling them they’re foolish for believing in god. But I unapologetically teach evolution in every single class, and have yet to offend a religious student (to my knowledge).

I support the prof in the Hamline case. However, I probably would have not shown the images in my class. I would have taught the topic, but maybe included optional image links or done something else out of an abundance of caution. I’ve had enough Muslim students that I just wouldn’t have wanted to show the images in class. I would have been worried about having a Muslim student who was hesitant to stick out or nervous about exercising the option to not view the images. I wouldn’t have been worried about a student trying to trick me. But I’m not an artist, so maybe I’m not fully understanding the nuances.

I wouldn’t send my kids to a religious school that did not support academic freedom (on the conservative side). I also wouldn’t send my kids to Hamline after hearing about these other academic freedom shenanigans (on a non-conservative side).

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Which is totally not the professor’s fault if so. The student should have been the one who learned a lesson from it.

Do they allow nudes in their art classes? Some folks could be offended. IMO, if it’s known in advance and allowed to be skipped (if a required class), then it’s up to the Prof what they want to teach.

We have Muslim students in our high school - and devout Christian ones too. They’re allowed to skip out on many things (movies, books, etc). It doesn’t mean the whole class has to skip those items.

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I agree absolutely. The only point I was making was that it seems far from certain to me that the student deliberately saw the picture in order to entrap the teacher, as some are contending.

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