Yesterday, the New York Times published a story about Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor teaching global art history at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., who was fired for showing a painting of Muhammad, Islam’s founding prophet, in class. Prater knew Islam is aniconic, so she went above and beyond to notify any believers in her course in advance of pictures they might find sacrilegious and objectionable in the lecture.
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.
How does something like this happen? Well, it’s the product of when seventh-century and 21st-century illiberalism come together in a gnarly repressive concoction. Woke administrators at Hamline were quick to kowtow to the demands of students who were calling for their feelings to “supersede academic freedom” on campus.
This is an outrageous request. Students’ sensitivities do not get to trump the freedom of inquiry that is essential to the mission of the academy. Of course, academic freedom is not absolute, and irreverence for irreverence’s sake is just insolence. But this image wasn’t being shown in bad taste. It was presented for a pedagogical purpose. If Muslims in the course didn’t want to see the picture, they could’ve just stepped out of the classroom. If the exposing of students to an image like this isn’t acceptable in higher education, what can be taught in college humanities classes? At some point, one has to wonder if this sort of self-censored liberal-arts education is even worth pursuing.