The politics of medieval art
January 8, 2023 7:38 PM Subscribe

A Minnesota University Is Under Fire for Dismissing an Art History Professor Who Showed Medieval Paintings of the Prophet Muhammad. Also at the NY Times (paywall): A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job
posted by bigyellowtaxi (163 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite

There was a two-minute content warning prior to the artworks’ appearance, to allow students to opt out of viewing the potentially offensive imagery should they feel it was against their faith.

...

The images were made, almost without exception, by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons in respect for, and in exaltation of, Muhammad and the Quran,” Gruber wrote.
posted by aniola at 7:42 PM on January 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

Ken White (popehat) had a great breakdown of this the other day: Hamline University and Cancel Culture

he does not mince words:

A lot of dumping on colleges and college students is culture war nonsense. But sometimes people deserve to be dumped on, because they’ve done contemptible things. “Cancel culture” is widely overused in unprincipled ways, but sometimes I think reasonable people can agree the label applies easily and cleanly. This is such a case. For shame, Hamline administrators and students and “journalists.” I question whether you’re suited to be there.

posted by Kybard at 7:47 PM on January 8, 2023 [31 favorites]

A content warning that the main link contains a number of images of Muhammad inline with the text, visible immediately.
posted by Superilla at 7:50 PM on January 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's important to note, especially in this case, that the images of Muhammad in question are of Persian origin, created by Muslims, in keeping with their faith.

The prohibition of images of Muhammad is specific to a sect of Islam. I think it is safe to treat it with the same level of respect as not operating a machine of any kind on Sunday: something that is important to a minority that is not a significant burden to acknowledge, but not something people should be obligated to follow.
posted by Merus at 7:59 PM on January 8, 2023 [56 favorites]

as a lowly B.F.A holder this whole thing infuriates me.
posted by djseafood at 8:15 PM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Knowing full well that once a case like this becomes widely distributed in the media that it's nearly guaranteed to inspire a Charlie Hebdo-type attack against your institution by the law of large numbers, I wonder if that was an unspoken factor for the administration

And that attack would be against students and faculty who didn't even take the class

Yes, that's a cowardly point of view but I think anyone being honest with themselves will admit that doing the right thing with regard to liberal ethics is more difficult factoring in the full history of violence perpetrated by extremist Islamism
posted by Skwirl at 8:31 PM on January 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

This is certainly worth a read, and illuminates the situation— Christiane Gruber, "An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad" in New Lines Magazine.

These incidents, statements and actions at Hamline will be for others to investigate further. As a scholar specializing in Islamic representations of Muhammad, however, it is my duty to share accurate information about the painting at the heart of the controversy. I will provide a visual analysis and historical explanation of the image in question, in essence reconstituting the Hamline instructor’s classroom activity. I will then explore these types of depictions over the course of six centuries, with the aim to answer one basic question: Is the Islamic painting at the heart of the Hamline controversy truly Islamophobic?
…
Hamline administrators have labeled this corpus of Islamic depictions of Muhammad, along with their teaching, as hateful, intolerant and Islamophobic. And yet the visual evidence proves contrary: The images were made, almost without exception, by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons in respect for, and in exaltation of, Muhammad and the Quran. They are, by definition, Islamophilic from their inception to their reception. How did Hamline arrive at such a flawed conclusion, what are its implications, and where do we go from here?

The first problem is a presupposition — by many individuals — that Islam does not have, or that it prohibits, figural representations of the prophet. While anxieties about images in many faiths have long existed, Islam has been largely defined, in contrast with Christianity, as a religious tradition that is largely aniconic, or lacking in figural images. The administrators at Hamline reiterated this inaccuracy with zeal, believing that such historical Islamic images were equivalent to offensive Euro-American cartoons and hence caused “harm” to the Muslims in their midst. Through conflation or confusion, Hamline has privileged an ultraconservative Muslim view on the subject that happens to coincide with the age-old Western cliche that Muslims are banned from viewing images of the prophet. This Muslim traditionalist and American Orientalist “echo chamber” is not just simplistic and counterfactual; it also muzzles all other voices while potentially endangering rare and precious works of Islamic art.

Beyond the Hamline interdictions, Muslim artists continue to practice their craft in tandem with universities. One particularly dazzling example is the 2016 permanent site-specific mosaic of Muhammad’s celestial ascension (“miraj”) made by Shahzia Sikander for Princeton University. Titled “Ecstasy as Sublime, Heart as Vector,” this monumental artwork measures 66 feet in height and depicts Muhammad riding his flying steed al-Buraq, both contoured in a sterling radiance. When asked about her choice to show Muhammad in this manner, Sikander responded: “By rendering a canonical painterly motif as a silhouette of reflective white gold, the miraj image seems to come to life, literally popping out of the composition as it reflects the light in the space throughout the day and at night.” Her work’s title describing Muhammad as a sublime and ecstatic “vector of the heart” offers the latest contribution to the genre, expanding Islamic art and depictions of the prophet to a U.S. college campus. Hamline could learn much from this case of granting choice — or license — when it comes to Islamic images of Muhammad, in which a collaborative undertaking in creative celebration of Islam will surely better withstand the test of time.

posted by Ahmad Khani at 8:36 PM on January 8, 2023 [42 favorites]

Gift link and permanent archive link for the NYT article, which is rather good and emphasises the multiple content warnings that were given.
posted by Rumple at 8:53 PM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

There was a discussion on the blue a while back on a student professor conflict, and someone, and I wish I recalled who, said that the real winner would be university administrators. This case certainly seems to support that view.
posted by ockmockbock at 8:54 PM on January 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

That Ken White essay was spot-on.
posted by ducky l'orange at 9:02 PM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

I would like to know more about the investigation and the specific complaint by the student before jumping to the conclusion that this was as outrageous as presented in the articles. I’ve been burned so many times by these outrage inducing “how dare they” stories that my default response now is “oh really” instead.
posted by interogative mood at 9:26 PM on January 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

To elaborate some basic questions that come to mind:

-This was the global art history class, so why was the decision made to show this specific Persian Miniatures rather than ones that didn’t feature the Prophet Muhammad? The lecturer obviously understood that it could be problematic based in the warnings presented.
-in what context was the artwork shown, was statement were made by the individual. Was there something in their presentation that was offensive — e.g. presenting Muslims as foolish for getting upset about the pictures, making some snide remarks, etc,

The context is important and we have none of it.
posted by interogative mood at 9:32 PM on January 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

The NYT article gives a lot of context and none of it involves snide remarks or other elements beyond the showing of the images being seen as problematic. Well, there's the factor that students feel the university is not that welcoming always to Muslim students in actuality, but that seems to have been a general complaint.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:43 PM on January 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

As for why they were shown, it is also given in the articles: to point out that not all branches of Islam believe that you cannot draw images of the Prophet, and that some of the depictions of him are an important part of the history of Islamic art.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:49 PM on January 8, 2023 [31 favorites]

-This was the global art history class, so why was the decision made to show this specific Persian Miniatures rather than ones that didn’t feature the Prophet Muhammad? The lecturer obviously understood that it could be problematic based in the warnings presented.
-in what context was the artwork shown, was statement were made by the individual. Was there something in their presentation that was offensive — e.g. presenting Muslims as foolish for getting upset about the pictures, making some snide remarks, etc,

The context is important and we have none of it.

The NYT article both quotes from and links to the student newspaper article that contains an interview with the student who raised the complaint; at no point was anything offensive (beyond the act of showing the images) mentioned. How likely is it that the professor showed the image, then said a bunch of terrible stuff about Muslims, but that everyone involved -- from the student who was offended and raised the complaint to the administration that fired her -- chose to not mention the terrible stuff that was said?

The student newspaper quotes the lecture from a recorded video (this is the entirety of the quote -- again I suppose it is possible that the student newspaper is also in cahoots with everyone else in not mentioning the terrible stuff, despite being sympathetic to the student who complained):

“I am showing you this image for a reason. And that is that there is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture,” the professor said before changing to the slide that included these depictions.

Conveniently, this seems to provide context to both of your questions.
posted by Superilla at 10:08 PM on January 8, 2023 [44 favorites]

“I am showing you this image for a reason. And that is that there is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture.”

the specific complaint by the student before jumping to the conclusion that this was as outrageous as presented in the articles

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.

None of this seems to be disputed, so what facts do you think exist that would change the situation?

-This was the global art history class, so why was the decision made to show this specific Persian Miniatures rather than ones that didn’t feature the Prophet Muhammad? The lecturer obviously understood that it could be problematic based in the warnings presented.
-in what context was the artwork shown, was statement were made by the individual. Was there something in their presentation that was offensive — e.g. presenting Muslims as foolish for getting upset about the pictures, making some snide remarks, etc,

The context is important and we have none of it.

You have the context from various sources, it just doesn't go along with your seeming agenda of pushing that there was something inappropriate going on. There's a trend of people of religious faiths sitting in classes that would challenge their views and then complaining to try to get anything like that censored going forward.

The burden of proof is on the accuser - why should the instructor have to step up to defend why they included a source in the class when no one has demonstrated ill intent? Requiring that instructors only include milquetoast content that can't possibly offend anyone is not the world we want.

I took multiple courses in college that had content that would have been considered problematic by multiple Christian groups. The instructors did what this instructor did and it really wasn't a problem, at least at the time. Islam seems to get a particularly strong set of treatments on the matter, which to be blunt, I think is influenced by the violent tendencies of conservative Islam.

But regardless of the religion, I don't want college instructors bound to not doing anything that could offend anyone. There's not been any evidence introduced showing bad faith so until there is, we should assume good faith.

To sort of borrow from the Popehat article, I think including Piss Christ, that many people thought was offensive, in classes is a good thing because many of those offended people didn't even understand the piece.

But if you're arguing with an organization that says that any use of green or any use of a picture of someone is completely inappropriate, there's no good compromise.
posted by Candleman at 10:33 PM on January 8, 2023 [35 favorites]

FWIW it’s the lecturer’s casual contract that is the critical thing here; plenty of academic teachers present material in classes that’s offensive, gratuitous, provocative or otherwise unpleasant. I’ve done it myself as a teacher, and have had arguments as a student after correcting a lecturer. That’s teaching, it’s messy and adult.

But to manage to have someone sacked over it, is, as they say, a huge dick move, and the potential for it is one of the reasons I am glad no longer to work these ridiculous short-term teaching contracts.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 10:44 PM on January 8, 2023 [31 favorites]

If a native American person told me X was scared in their tradition and they prefer I not display X when talking about their traditions. I may disagree, but I would respect it. I don't see how this is different. If tribe A is okay with it and tribe B is not, I would respect tribe B's wishes.

Imagine saying that you wouldn't be presenting any texts from Martin Luther in your class about the history of Christianity because Catholics consider it sacrilegious to deny the divinity of the Pope. Would you be giving a fair characterization of Christianity by doing so?
posted by 0xFCAF at 10:57 PM on January 8, 2023 [72 favorites]

The student was given the content warning, and chose not to heed it. It is fundamentally impossible to talk about Islamic art without the very relevant context that in some traditions depictions of the Prophet were permitted, if only to contextualise why and how those very depictions became unacceptable. This is an absolute dick move by the student, and in the least charitable interpretation it is designed to get the lecturer removed. Students are fucking arseholes - if they are allowed to be. Which is where the faculty and the university come in: they have absolutely, without good reason, destroyed this person's career. This is the issue with modern universities worldwide: students are customers, not learners. Learning is hard. It is challenging. It may not necessarily break down your personal boundaries or prejudices, but if you choose a university education you are going to have to account for those challenges in order to give those boundaries an intellectual grounding.

When fuckwit administrators collapse like this, it leaves staff absolutely unsupported. It makes me physically ill for this poor academic. I'm furious.
posted by prismatic7 at 11:05 PM on January 8, 2023 [41 favorites]

I think what the adjunct was exactly teaching and the student’s complaint are both essentially irrelevant to this case.

The adjunct was teaching what she thought best to teach, and the student complained. That is all fine, colleges hire academics to share their expertise, and if a student has some complaint, there should be a process to deal with it.

Where things seem to fall apart completely is the administrative response. I can’t for the life of me figure out why they thought that having a discussion about this at a public event would be a good idea. They seem to have had no process in place to deal with it, and if they did, it was a bad process.

That’s where I think the New York Times article falls short, incidentally. It seems to treat this as a story about a conflict between muslim students and an academic, and doesn’t really dig into what was going on in the university’s administration. To me, that seems like it’s the real story, but an administrative fuck-up at a Minnesota academic institute isn’t a big enough news event for the New York Times, so they try to make it into a symbol for, I don’t know, cancel culture and the clash of civilizations and some bullshit.
posted by Kattullus at 11:29 PM on January 8, 2023 [25 favorites]

Imagine saying that you wouldn't be presenting any texts from Martin Luther in your class about the history of Christianity because Catholics consider it sacrilegious to deny the divinity of the Pope.

Or no Christian figurative art in a Western art survey at all--because Christianity has its own iconoclastic tradition, at times quite vigorous, and I'm sure there are some survivors around somewhere.

These are complex questions, and it's disheartening to see well-intentioned leftists applying simple dictums without thought for nuance or differing social contexts.
posted by praemunire at 11:55 PM on January 8, 2023 [18 favorites]

it’s the lecturer’s casual contract that is the critical thing here

The adjunct was teaching what she thought best to teach

This is crucial and not always appreciated, so: the faculty member in question was not tenured. They were not tenure track. They were an adjunct ("sessional" in Canadian higher ed), someone hired to teach a specific class at a given time. Generally institutions pay them very badly. To the point of this story, *adjuncts do not have tenure's protections.* Colleges and universities can fire them mid-class, but even more easily just refuse to hire them again.

Adjuncts are academia's temps. They also teach the majority of classes in American higher ed.
posted by doctornemo at 12:17 AM on January 9, 2023 [27 favorites]

If the prohibition against images of the Prophet is associated with ultraconservative Islam, then I'm willing to place a small bet that the bolded line was the part the student actually took offense too. The ultraconservative religious mindset doesn't differ much from faith to faith.

Maybe the student was ultraconservative, and maybe they were acting in bad faith, but the scenario that came to mind for me was that they'd been frustrated by the constant microagressions (and maybe larger aggressions) they've probably been dealing with all their lives for being Muslim (and maybe non-white), and automatically categorized this event as part of that and decided this was the point where enough was enough, and that this was worth standing up against.

To clarify, I think that if so, they were completely wrong about this actually being an offense. But good-faith yet out-of-proportion reactions to both mild offenses and not-actually-offenses things seems increasingly common these days. (I'm using offense in the sense of an actual transgression against someone, not in the sense of "it caused me to feel offense"; I think the line between the two is at the heart of a lot of these cases.)

It's really interesting because on the one hand, it's extremely good that on a societal level we're finally starting to pay attention to the ways we all hurt each other and all the offenses we've been expecting people to swallow -- where a lot of these had long been invisible because of ignorance, and others have deliberately been downplayed to maintain power structures. And on the other hand, living in any kind of society pretty much requires learning to let a lot of small offenses of all kinds slide, and the less homogeneous a society is the more small offenses there are going to be. And while sometimes that's a symptom of systems of oppression, very often it's also a symptom of diversity itself -- sort of like how living in an apartment building in a busy city requires a lot of concessions that living alone in an isolated house does not, writ large. I think this tension between the need to stand up against the first kind of offense and the need to learn to philosophically accept the second kind of offense as an inherent part of life among other humans is giving rise to a lot of cases like this. And I think that for many people, the more of the first kind of offense we're forced to accept, the harder it is to swallow, or even recognize, the second kind.

"Go along to get along" is a message that's being increasingly rejected these days, along with various other types of traditional social lubrication (how many of us have been told, as women, to stop saying "please" and "thank you" so much, and how many times have we said or heard "I shouldn't have to explain that to you"?) In many cases that's good and a very understandable reaction to oppression; and simultaneously there's a reason pretty much every social system on a large scale places so much value on harmony and on behaviors that maintain harmony, and it's not only about upholding oppression but also about remaining functional in a real world with real people who are all operating in different contexts. It'll be interesting to see how far society can move away from harmony-first approaches while both reducing oppression and maintaining functionality.

(All this is just about the student and their reaction, and not the university's reaction, which is a whole other story.)
posted by trig at 12:38 AM on January 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

More links:
Inside Higher Ed

Chronicle of Higher Education: "Most of All, I am Offended as a Muslim", "Fired for Teaching Art History" (paywalled)

Change.org petition "in Support of the Dismissed Hamline Instructor Wrongly Accused of Islamophobia"

Reason

PEN America
posted by doctornemo at 12:48 AM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Imagine if the Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses were the "real Christians" and everybody knew that in Christianity you could not (insert extreme belief here). That is what is going on today with Wahabbism and it is killing diversity and local cultural practices throughout the Muslim World.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:18 AM on January 9, 2023 [24 favorites]

(and I dislike my own choice of describing such values as liberal as though they're antithetical to Islam, but that's the world I live in)
posted by cendawanita at 2:32 AM on January 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's also the case that the instructor didn't pick a piece randomly. She picked a piece that is considered a particularly fine historical Persian illustration, and one that is a product of an important centre and period of Islamic art. And also allowed signposted that it would appear very well.

Reading between the lines it feels like she was let go as an easy and cheap way to show the university was culturally sensitive, despite the fact that the meeting held about it seems to have raised the fact that some Muslim students didn't feel like the university was particularly welcoming on other fronts.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 2:56 AM on January 9, 2023 [15 favorites]

I feel like most of the good comments about why Hamline made the wrong choice have already been made here, and in the various articles I’ve read, many posted here. I will add:

The idea that this was done in order to avert a Hebdo-like attack was probably in the mind of some administrators. It’s a shitty place to be, because pre-appeasement to avert potential terrorist attacks is wrong on all levels. And also, violent attacks happen for all sorts of reasons regularly now on school campuses. God help anyone with a responsibility for campus safety if they do not consider the possibility.

To the cynicism thing… many colleges and universities have been under increased external and internal scrutiny associated with deep-seated systemic/historical biases. Some of the concerns that students and others have are about serious, glaring issues of equity that can’t be fixed quickly (budget priorities; faculty demographics; etc.). In that context, being able to put a seeming “win” up on the board is presumably quite the relief for some administrators. And I’m not necessarily talking about the stereotypical ladder-climbing Assistant Vice Under-Dean making $300K for no clear reason, but people of true good will who want students from all walks of life feel welcome at their institution.
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:32 AM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

And on the other hand, living in any kind of society pretty much requires learning to let a lot of small offenses of all kinds slide, and the less homogeneous a society is the more small offenses there are going to be.

Responding just to this and not intending to address the larger discussion, I'd say: "Maybe so but also distributed more evenly."
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:19 AM on January 9, 2023

"Maybe so but also distributed more evenly."

The offenses or the need to let them go? That doesn't seem generally right to me historically speaking, but we're probably envisioning different scenarios.
posted by trig at 4:26 AM on January 9, 2023

I definitely grew up in a time and place where I'm taught that all visual depictions of the prophets are haram - and I'm not alone, this is pervasive enough I remembered watching Egyptian historical dramas, and there's one about Moses, and even he wasn't portrayed visually.

When doing interfaith work with Muslims in the MENA region in the past this was my impression as well: that visual depictions of all prophets, not just Mohammed, were haram (and this isn't just a Wahabi thing, it's the mainline Sunni Islam take in large parts of that region). However, my impression is that there's some subtlety in how this is actually lived out. For example, I toured a bunch of Coptic churches with my Muslim colleagues and there's loads of visual depictions of Biblical figures who are prophets in Islam in those spaces. None of my Muslim colleagues raised any concerns about seeing those or being in those spaces (though maybe being good hosts outweighed religious scruples in that case).

I'd imagine that a strict interpretation on the visual depiction of all prophets being haram would make taking world art history courses, or even visiting a museum in the West, pretty difficult. I'd be interested in reading things from Muslims in the West who take this prohibition seriously about ways they negotiate these topics and spaces. Does anyone know of any? My general impression of Shari'a and fiqh is that in the right hands they have a fair amount of flexibility which can allow Muslims to balance the need to coexist with non-Muslims while maintaining appropriate modes of piety.

In general, I'm always a bit worried that discussions like this always seem to frame this in a very post-Christian sort of way (secular, liberal understandings of free-speech and desacralised understandings of art as purely aesthetic versus conservative, religious dogmatism and the mystification of art). In that framing Islam can only ever be regressive, oppressive, or irrelevent. It's never a place where interesting discussions are happening. Even in the articles in this post, most of the authors are people for whom an image could really never have any personal religious significance for good or ill and for whom Islam is a thing to be studied rather than lived and explored. My suspicion is that there's lots of debate about how to walk the line between accommodating difference and proper observance in western Muslim circles and I'd love to read more of that sort of analysis. My suspicion is that it might have solutions beyond just accepting or rejecting the postmodern Western understanding of art as being of purely of aesthetic or historical significance.
posted by nangua at 4:46 AM on January 9, 2023 [13 favorites]

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. I'd expect a more heterogeneous society to have more evenly distributed offenses. I led with the disclaimer because I didn't really want to speak to the possible entailing thought that we don't really live in a heterogeneous society and therefore certain groups would be expected to encounter more offense and, therefore, might have more difficultly glossing over that greater accumulation. To be frank, I think the treatment of the instructor is bullshit. Even if we construed their actions as being inappropriate due to that differential burden of offenses in society-at-large or to the mores of particular subsets of it, this was part of an academic discourse and one which they seemed to have provided ample opportunity to participants for whom it may have had a high valency to remove themselves. I mean, that's exactly what you sign up for as part of a non-Liberty University type of education.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:50 AM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Adjuncts are the cheaply-built, disposable foundations that the whole University system has been engineered to rest on.

They are also cannon fodder for cowardly and venal administration's destruction of academic freedom.

I mix these metaphors deliberately.
posted by lalochezia at 4:56 AM on January 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

nangua, I really appreciate your comment. The context is fascinating, particularly the contrasts you describe between conflicting obligations. I think Hamline is also the kind of institution (private) where the concerns you are point up could be more feasibly addressed through the kind of public and private discussions that this incident could have entailed.

Speaking personally, as one who has attended or worked at public institutions of higher education for most of my adult life, I hope that we can find ways to address your points without compromising academic freedom. I do not believe that anyone individual's feelings about religion should have impacted the classroom experience here, or the fallout. Speaking as a U.S. citizen, with my country's history, movement in that direction -- currently picking up steam, in fact, thanks to the far right's recent gains -- will inevitably mean compromising academic freedom in order to spare the feelings, potential or otherwise, of conservative Christians. I do not want public funding in this country to go to institutions that support and practice religious discrimination.

(Please note: I am trying not to derail here, simply noting what I see as a likely outcome of this kind of decision in public academic spaces.)
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:18 AM on January 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

I live in Minneapolis, I took a couple of classes at Hamline as part of a certification program some years ago. I think it would be very, very helpful in understanding this situation to talk to some large number of Somali Muslims from the Twin Cities, because I think that this is a very local situation that is getting turned into a referendum on Islam and art and whatever because that's more fun to hold forth about in the media.

Indeed, it would be a lot better if this whole thing weren't on the internet at all because it's the type of conflict that should be dealt with at the college community level. Now everyone from the student on up is performing for the internet.

Also, look this was not done to avoid a Hebdo like attack. Or if it was, the administrator who thought that is a massive racist and should be booted into the street immediately.

A lot of people don't understand that the Twin Cities has - for the US - a large Muslim population. I live in the city proper in a multiracial neighborhood and every day that I leave my house to run errands I interact with Muslims. There are Muslim businesses on my street. Muslims are neighbors, colleagues and friends - every non-Muslim who works in a large business or large institution literally knows a number of Muslims personally. My old gym had accommodations for prayer. Like, the interests of Muslim Minnesotans are a legitimate part of regular Minnesotan life. And Muslim Minnesotans aren't idiots - even if there is a tiny minority of people who genuinely think that terrorist attacks on people who mock Islam are okay, they know the difference between running a bunch of images specifically to provoke and choosing to display a piece of historical Muslim art in a classroom.

There is still a lot of racism in Minnesota and there's (as far as I can tell from the outside) a lot of theological stuff about how being Muslim and being 1.5 or 2nd generation in Minnesota is going to work - being Muslim here is different from being Muslim in Somalia and that's hard to navigate.

I have to get to work, but I have a bit more to say about this. I think firing the professor was absolutely the wrong choice, but I think the way this whole thing is being painted nationally is at worst racist and at best very detached from lived conditions.
posted by Frowner at 5:58 AM on January 9, 2023 [28 favorites]

I read this in the NY Times the other day, and initially had a lot of sympathy for the professor. I think I still do.

But then I remembered that the NY Times does like to publish a lot things that take a stance of, "This person did a completely reasonable thing, and then the cancel culture warriors came for them!"

And over the last few years I've found that I really need to be skeptical about these stories. It's so easy for these stories to be represented so that they confirm your biases and inflame your passions. It makes it hard to be critical or see nuance - I just feel like it's so easy to be manipulated with stories like this.
posted by entropone at 6:57 AM on January 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

As I understand it from the internet, Hamline has tried to position itself as welcoming to local Muslim students with mixed success - here is a short comment from 2018 by a Muslim student about prayer and religious holidays. Some of this is sincere and some of it is probably marketing. But it's not, like, weird or out of line with local practice. For instance, a friend works at a social service provider where they have a meditation/prayer room attached to little rooms set up for ablutions.

In general, I'm always a bit worried that discussions like this always seem to frame this in a very post-Christian sort of way (secular, liberal understandings of free-speech and desacralised understandings of art as purely aesthetic versus conservative, religious dogmatism and the mystification of art).

With a lot of this stuff, I think we need to acknowledge that it is difficult to balance the needs of religious and secular communities and that as with most compromises, probably no one is going to be totally happy. This is an actual conflict - deeply observant Muslims don't want to have to look at images of the prophets because that's blasphemous and upsetting, and secular non-Muslims just think it's art. I think the best solutions to these problems are going to be individual, local and kind of kludgy rather than magisterial and universal - no point in saying that no students anywhere should encounter anything they don't believe in, no point in saying that academic freedom means that students should literally be required to commit blasphemy to pass the class.

There is a difference between "encountering something that your religion frowns on" and "literally committing a specific, concrete blasphemous act" - if Muslim students at a secular university said that no one should be allowed to eat pork on campus, that couldn't be allowed to fly, but you would not schedule dining hall meals so that there was literally nothing but pork-based choices on the theory that it was good to force students to push their boundaries and experience pork. I mean, it would be legit to have an art class where students considered Piss Christ, but you wouldn't force students to make a copy as some kind of material learning thing.

Honestly, if you asked me to solve this on my own, my recommendation would be that the professor continue to teach the course but that the in-class component involve a verbal description of the images and material/discussion/etc on changing norms in Islamic art, plus a link so that students could, if they chose, view the painting, either in class (depending on how that would be set up) or outside class. Students literally have laptops; it's not like they can't access a high-quality, detailed image.

Is this 100% satisfactory to everyone? No, not at all! But it moves the situation from "this professor is literally making me blaspheme in class" to "this professor is making me consider something my religion forbids", which I am pretty sure all religious students at secular universities have encountered before. Being annoyed at a professor or thinking they have terrible ideas is normal; I thought, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, that my professors were almost all reactionary old fuddy-duddies. It's also a lot easier for a university to say, "this is a secular university, you will sometimes encounter ideas that go against your personal beliefs" than to say "literally do a blasphemy in class".

I mean, if we stay outcomes-focused, where we want the students to be able to take the class and the professor to be able to teach and everyone to be able to get along with no more than the usual levels of conflict and annoyance, that is a lot easier to do than to hold a national referendum on academic freedom.

The university should absolutely not have fired the adjunct, but I guess at least they took the less-popular course - in the United States, nothing gets you more support than telling Muslims that their ideas are wrong and bad and anti-American and they just have to suck it up. Twitter is full of people leaping from "this was the wrong course for the university" to "Muslims are bad and foreign and don't belong and this is just more proof".

It's like, a student - a young person still finding her way in the world, and a student from a marginalized group who is made to feel her marginalization every day as I can tell you from living around here - felt upset about something that was a little upsetting, honestly. That's sympathetic.

I'm an atheist and even when I grew up in a religious home we were pretty ecumenical but it still gives me a little negative frisson to see certain frivolous denegrations of images of Christ. It's not something I'd ever complain about or think of for more than a moment, but I can see how if I actually believed, and if people routinely othered and marginalized me for my beliefs, it would be a pretty sore subject.
posted by Frowner at 7:15 AM on January 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

This is an actual conflict - deeply observant Muslims don't want to have to look at images of the prophets because that's blasphemous and upsetting, and secular non-Muslims just think it's art. I think the best solutions to these problems are going to be individual, local and kind of kludgy rather than magisterial and universal - no point in saying that no students anywhere should encounter anything they don't believe in, no point in saying that academic freedom means that students should literally be required to commit blasphemy to pass the class.

What if the instructor could announce that the image would be shown in the syllabus so that students are warned that this will occur in the class and can switch if even the concept is too much for them. Then, they could give students a couple of minutes of clear notice before the images are shown so that they can minimize the zoom window, turn off their screen or look away. Then, they could verbally let the students know when the images have stopped being shown, so they could safely return to class, without any risk whatsoever of committing blasphemy.

That would also put the onus on the 5% of students for whom this is a big deal to take the two seconds of action required to avoid it, rather than hoping that 95% of the class seeks out a link (which they won't). To me, that is already at "this professor is making me consider something my religion forbids" rather than "this professor is literally making me blaspheme in class". And, to be clear, is exactly what the professor in this case did.
posted by Superilla at 8:50 AM on January 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

"They are also cannon fodder"

Or canon fodder.
posted by Joan Rivers of Babylon at 9:02 AM on January 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

The framing is close enough to, "cancel culture gone mad" that I've got a big dangling, "what are they omitting from the story?" in the back of my mind. But unless the warning was phrased, "if anybody's got a problem with this, GTFO," I'm not sure what would get me to switch sides here.

One of my favourite art history things is when conventions you might think are universal are not. So yeah, leaving out Islamic art that does depict Muhammad would imply a uniformity to Islamic artistic traditions where I feel something is lost.
posted by RobotHero at 9:05 AM on January 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

The university should absolutely not have fired the adjunct, but I guess at least they took the less-popular course

If you look at broader american society, that sounds true. But in the context of american higher education administration, there's a different set of norms and expectations. Deferring to students' complaints, particularly from any student in a minority group considered oppressed, is more like the easy/lazy/popular course of action in that culture.
posted by vincebowdren at 9:14 AM on January 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

Honestly, if you asked me to solve this on my own, my recommendation would be that the professor continue to teach the course but that the in-class component involve a verbal description of the images and material/discussion/etc on changing norms in Islamic art, plus a link so that students could, if they chose, view the painting, either in class (depending on how that would be set up) or outside class.

It sounds like that is what was done, though? The PEN America statement notes that the professor let students know that the image would be shown in advance during the lecture and, as this was an online course, gave them the option of turning off their video feeds, leaving. . . verbal description and a discussion of changing norms in Islamic art.

[. . .] no point in saying that academic freedom means that students should literally be required to commit blasphemy to pass the class.

"this professor is literally making me blaspheme in class"

Again, based on the accounts in the PEN statement and the NYT article, that does not seem to be what was happening here.

I'm grateful for the context in the rest of your comments above—I lived in Minneapolis for years, and the experiences that you describe are similar to my own. Full disclosure: the unnamed professor and I were in the art history program together at the U, where we encountered this issue regularly as graduate students and teaching assistants in courses on the history of Islamic art as well as the art created within other religious traditions, including Catholicism. (I had more than one student during my time there object to depictions of nude bodies on the basis of it being offensive to them as Christians who were especially vigilant about keeping their minds free of anything that might be a source of sexual temptation or be perceived as impure.) In every single case, we were able to work with them to ensure that the images they were concerned about were not required viewing, but they were still accountable for understanding the historical context that we discussed in class and being able to talk about that context and comparable works of art in exams, papers, etc. in ways that showed that they met the courses' learning objectives.

There are obviously some crucial differences in these cases—most obviously, that a student who practices a more predominant religion is likely more comfortable approaching authority figures with requests like these and probably isn't bearing the cumulative weight of discrimination and microaggressions that would make this such a painful experience. But another key difference is that we had already established relationships with these students—and included language in our syllabi—that made them feel like they could talk to us about wanting these kinds of accommodations. This was an online class, and the professor is an adjunct teaching at multiple institutions, making this an especially poignant example of the ways in which relying on adjunct labor to teach high-enrollment survey courses harms students as well as the adjuncts teaching under these conditions.
posted by Anita Bath at 9:15 AM on January 9, 2023 [23 favorites]

Thanks for your perspective, Frowner. I think the local context is important here.

This subject is something I've been thinking a lot about during the last six-seven years, after I moved from teaching at a university with an almost entirely white student population to one where the students are much more diverse. And then other stuff has happened that has strengthened my focus on the issue.

Anyway, there are things that could add to the complexity here, that I didn't see discussed in the articles I read.

First of all, I'd like to know how old the students are? I haven't clicked all the links. This is a subject I would not introduce in the first couple of years of study. Not because the students are immature or stupid, but because the whole university/college system is new to them, and many of them, specially women and people of color are scared. They are trying to parse how authority works in the context of the university and they are often failing. Their experience from high school is not useful at all. And scared people can't listen properly. A lot of what López Prater did in the best of intentions will have worked against her: she said it was very important that the students saw these images and that she wanted to demonstrate that Islam has a rich and complex history. A very young student will often hear this and conclude that they can fail the course if they don't see the slide. I'm teaching first semester right now, and a couple of my female muslim students would absolutely understand it that way and panic. (When I first read that the student in the story was crying, I thought it was a bit melodramatic, until I remembered my own students).

Second, this happened during lockdown. The first rule of teaching online is: don't do anything that can be misunderstood or seen as controversial. Your class may be a little less elegant than normal, but you have to stick to that rule. People are in a room with their ignorant parents and siblings and you have no idea who you are teaching or what the discussion is. (Repeat this fifty times).
One of the things that happened here in Denmark during lockdown was that some art students threw a bust of a king into the harbor, huge drama ensued and their teacher and the dean were fired. It was a really stupid thing on every level, but it was very much a combination of lockdown and very young students who had not yet figured out how the school worked, and I feel I can recognize some aspects of that here.

Third, and this is the part I am thinking about in relation to my own classes: did she really need to show the images? I'm honestly not certain and I need more context to know. Yes, it is a true fact that some Muslim cultures have made amazing pictorial art, and art history students must know this. But there are thousands of wonderful miniatures and some other great stuff that could demonstrate the conventions and styles of this art. Would it make more sense to show the other stuff, and say in words that there are also paintings of the Profet and students can find them in these books and these museums?
I think that if I were teaching world art history at a basic level, there are tons of things I would find more important than those images. If I were teaching a specific course in medieval Islamic art, I would definitely have to show them, but then I would also have a smaller class with dedicated students. (I am not talking out of my ass here, 20 years ago, a mentor nudged me towards Islamic art and architecture and that might have been my career, but then the war in Iraq happened, which led to my life taking a different turn).

Lastly, it was obviously wrong to fire the professor. I am so angry on her behalf that I can barely write what I think about it, but yes, it is a symptom of the degradation of higher education.
posted by mumimor at 9:40 AM on January 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

One of the reasons that I think this needs to be a specific, local, individual solution is because I think it doesn't map neatly onto narratives about "students need to have their boundaries pushed" or "Christians don't want to look at naked people in art".

There is a difference, religiously speaking, between "this type of thing is not recommended" and "this specific individual action is literally blasphemy". It's one thing to tell people, "this is a secular institution and we expect you to do things in an educational context that you would not do in your everyday life" and another to tell them "because this is a secular institution, we require that you do an action which is literally considered blasphemous and that you would never, ever do in your day to day life".

It's the difference between saying, "you're taking a nutrition course and you will be reading material about pork as a food" and "you're taking a nutrition course and you will do a hands-on preparation of a nutritious pork meal which you must then sample".

Further, this isn't a class about images of Islam in art - it's a more general world art history course, so de-emphasizing any one specific image to make the class accessible to a specific student population isn't really changing the impact of the course. By comparison, naked people are pretty common in art; saying "I refuse to look at naked people in art because it tempts me to sin" really means that there is a lot of art you are refusing to have in class, and that makes any survey course really Not Work. Similarly, if a Muslim student said that they didn't want to see images of women with uncovered hair, too bad for them, that undercuts too much of the course.

My feeling is that this is a specific, local, in-community issue because you need to balance a whole lot of really individual things. If this were a class specifically and totally about Islam in art, if this were a class where most students didn't have computers, if the student wanted the instructor to literally avoid talking about images of Mohammed as if no Muslims ever made any - all those would suggest different approaches. If a lot would be lost by accommodating the student(s), in short, it would make sense to push the issue.

But as-is, you have a class where you can talk about the image and the issues it raises and make it accessible to students another way without making the Muslim students specifically opt out or cover their eyes or feel weird - you can accommodate with basically no loss or effort.

My feeling is that it behooves people to say yes when they can so that they have the capital to say no when they have to - if you have a history of accommodating Muslim students on everyday stuff, you have credibility to say no when something genuinely difficult comes along.

That said, if this weren't splashed all over the internet and turned into another Madness of the Wokes, Especially Muslims story, the students and department could sit down and have some meetings and come to a custom solution that met everyone's needs a little better. As-is, it gets turned into some kind of national pearl-clutching opportunity which serves no one except the media.
posted by Frowner at 9:51 AM on January 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

Or no Christian figurative art in a Western art survey at all--because Christianity has its own iconoclastic tradition, at times quite vigorous, and I'm sure there are some survivors around somewhere.

Oh, yeah. I wrote for a western PA alt-weekly whose then art critic lambasted an art exhibit because it was influenced by Christian Orthodox iconography.

"It is impossible to truly understand and appreciate holy icons unless you are an Orthodox Christian," he wrote. "[S]o much do they go to the heart, soul, and worship of the Orthodox people."

I admit I'm pretty permissive in what's allowable for art. Rilke: "Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them."
posted by touchstone033 at 10:00 AM on January 9, 2023

Frowner, I feel like you're really diminishing the fact that the students could have left the room (/minimized the Zoom window), and that the image was mentioned in the syllabus.

Who is arguing that the students "must" do this? The analogy about pork in your comment really doesn't seem like a very equivalent example.
posted by sagc at 10:00 AM on January 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

There is a difference, religiously speaking, between "this type of thing is not recommended" and "this specific individual action is literally blasphemy...Similarly, if a Muslim student said that they didn't want to see images of women with uncovered hair, too bad for them, that undercuts too much of the course.

The problem with this is that it opens up a very messy can of worms. Who decides that that difference is, or where the "low effort no problem vs. too much too bad" line is? Do you really want universities in the position of making rulings on religious doctrine and what a student's professed faith "really" requires of them or what, in the school's view, is really necessary for them to endure?

My feeling is that it behooves people to say yes when they can so that they have the capital to say no when they have to - if you have a history of accommodating Muslim students on everyday stuff, you have credibility to say no when something genuinely difficult comes along.

I think exactly the opposite is true, and is almost always how these things play out: the next person will come along and say, "Hey, you accommodated their request, why aren't you accommodating mine?" And if the answer is "We don't think your faith actually requires this, or it's too much trouble for us", get ready for the ensuing shitstorm.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:05 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think exactly the opposite is true, and is almost always how these things play out: the next person will come along and say, "Hey, you accommodated their request, why aren't you accommodating mine?" And if the answer is "We don't think your faith actually requires this, or it's too much trouble for us", get ready for the ensuing shitstorm.

Well, in my experience that is simply not true. But I don't know how to measure stuff like that, there are so many variables.

In my experience, accommodating student's needs make them relax and open up, and eventually, their boundaries are moved. They understand that I am on their side and will help them through the proverbial desert. But I can see that it doesn't work in the same way for all my colleagues. I could guess why, but in this context, I just want to point out that there is no single solution.
posted by mumimor at 10:14 AM on January 9, 2023

It's the difference between saying, "you're taking a nutrition course and you will be reading material about pork as a food" and "you're taking a nutrition course and you will do a hands-on preparation of a nutritious pork meal which you must then sample".

Hey, so. A couple of anecdotes but yeah not from Minnesota:

1) when I was living in Glasgow, one of my friends was a convert (not very recent actually) who's naturally been taking Islamic classes at the mosque. In that city the predominant sunni school(s) were whatever that's prevalent in South Asia. Anyway once we got into a small "no it isn't, yes it is" about horse meat. Because she's been taught it's absolutely Haram. Verboten. And I'm like there are Central Asians who would like to speak to you.

2) i used to be part of an organizing team that a couple of times welcomed Afghan delegations. The first time we had dinner for them, in very typical Southeast Asian fashion, there was a lot of seafood. Turns out it's practically Haram in their mazhab (also related to them being a landlocked country), and they refused to touch it.

3) not food: pilgrims coming back from Mecca always come back with scandalized gossip about how other Muslims pray and do worship. We're not talking small differences: one would wet an entire head for ablutions while others merely pass a wet hand over their forehead. Malaysians get scandalized that other Muslim women pray with their hands exposed omg. We completely cover ourselves like tents.

-----
Horse meat, variations amongst the fiqh. Seafood, variations amongst the fiqh. Pork? NO ONE DISAGREES that it's Haram. Seriously, do not carry water for the most conservative reading, especially what you're literally saying is Persian Islamic art is equivalent to the heaviest form of najis (idek what it is in English, but mughallazah is worse than everyday feces, which is where pork is categorized under). Fiqh disagreements are alive and active and these students have managed to persist in living out the most close-minded response to it.

I appreciate really the defence especially in terms of microaggressions but I'm living in a similar society where I am seeing us getting more and more conservative and, no. I'd rather not let them represent me.
posted by cendawanita at 10:17 AM on January 9, 2023 [36 favorites]

And also, I don't think you actually support what you're proposing because, as also noted above, this isn't an issue unique to Islam. There are a galaxy of Christian faiths, some containing restrictions on believers not shared by the vast majority.

I think Frowner made a pretty good case that we have to imagine what it would be like to be in that minority that believes the more restrictive thing. When the instructor explicitly says "I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture" it seems reasonable that the member of sect Y would feel called out.

In general, we tend to discount beliefs by saying "here is a similar person who doesn't believe it," as if that demonstrates that the belief is willful or optional. The Times piece does stack the deck by putting such an observation in the kicker, ending with the Duke prof. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies who values images of Mohammed and displays them.
posted by anhedonic at 10:20 AM on January 9, 2023

Hot tip from a Muslim: if you're grasping for food analogies, go with alcohol. Restrictions against pork has always been clear and non-negotiable. Alcohol have a slightly more nuanced history almost similar to portraying human images in that it used to be accepted, then with caveats, then not at all.

(Ok except for my Arab relatives who are like, nooo it's not all alcohol it's really just wine!)
posted by cendawanita at 10:24 AM on January 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

I guess the huge problem I have with this is that if you wanted to write down, ahead of time, some guidelines to give your teaching staff, you would write something like

Use your best judgement in determining the educational value of a given image or work
Carefully consider if anyone in your class might be offended, triggered, or otherwise distressed by viewing that image
If an image might cause distress to some students, provide ample warning (several minutes) and a reasonable accommodation (example: minimizing a Zoom window) for those students to not view that work
Provide audio context for those students to know when the image is no longer shown

Did the professor not do any of those things? Are those bad guidelines? Was the judgement really so bad as to justify terminating their contract? Are we actually putting forth a generalizable principle here that other staff could meaningfully enact in their own lesson plans?
posted by 0xFCAF at 10:28 AM on January 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think Frowner made a pretty good case that we have to imagine what it would be like to be in that minority that believes the more restrictive thing. When the instructor explicitly says "I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture" it seems reasonable that the member of sect Y would feel called out.

Then they feel called out. Again, this is a secular institution in a multicultural, multi-faith society. At some point you're going to have deal with that. That's not an argument for accommodation of that feeling or their belief.

If the mere statement "I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture" makes you feel attacked under your version of that faith, sorry, we can't operate in a mixed society otherwise anymore than we could accept not referring to Catholics as Christians because some Protestant denominations fiercely reject that (if you don't know what I'm talking about, spend some time in the Southern US).
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:31 AM on January 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

Cannot read whole thread so don't know if anybody else said this, but it sounds like Hamline has a whole bunch of students who are not mature enough to be at a University, and an Administration that absolutely does not have either a clear sense of what an educational mission looks like or their faculty's backs. A shitshow all around.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:33 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, you know what's worse than looking at some picture art done with the best of intentions by your fellow muslims? Actually touching a dog (if you're already from a very strict reading of fiqh - mazhabs differ here too! Turkish people look at Malaysians like we're weirdos because we get legit triggered kind of anxious when a dog is nearby. Because we're taught it's any part of the dog. Others point out it's the parts with saliva and sweat.). There's a whole ritual purification involving clay or earth should anything happen.

Do you guys think there's no Muslim vets??
posted by cendawanita at 10:37 AM on January 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’m the conversation after the class the head of the MSA, a senior in the class talked with the professor and said in the interview that they did not feel respected.

That seems to be more significant than the mere presentation of the artwork in class. Faith is a deeply important element of personal identify for many people and it is theirs to own and proclaim. If you are not part of that faith — in this case Muslim/non-Muslim — but consider others then you need to accept that if you student disagrees with you; you shouldn’t argue or tell them “actually your faith is ….” This is especially true when presenting on subject matter that is now widely deemed heretical.

Based on my knowledge of Persian miniatures from this period I would also challenge the necessity of going into this particular facet. More important is to discuss how these artists attempted to avoid general prohibitions on idolatry and how even after working out things like the rules of perspective and other techniques for more realistic paintings they kept things in a more 2d view and used other rules to keep within the looser structures of the time. As with Christianity there were also periods where iconoclasts took power and smashed and burned artwork.

You can do this all without showing the few surviving examples that depict Mohammed.
posted by interogative mood at 10:39 AM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Whenever this kind of thing comes up, it really strikes me that US culture starts from an anti-youth, anti-student perspective - our unconscious position is "those bad, intellectually lazy students will seize every opportunity to whine and complain and push boundaries and avoid work; education is something that we need to cram down their throats whether they like it or not for their own good, and they probably won't like it".

So of course, a Muslim student who thinks she'll be fine seeing something but then freaks out when it actually happens is an unsympathetic figure who is out to get us somehow, and of course if we yield an inch to those lazy students they will take a mile - if we say that they can look at one picture on their own then pretty soon we can't show anything except Yves Klein paintings because other students will be offended by everything else.

The other thing that strikes me is that no one can imagine anything except "the professor should decide what to do without taking student responses into account at all because academic freedom" (which is not how teaching usually happens - faculty try to teach in accessible ways all the time!) and "the professor should be fired if students complain".

What about "hm, I taught it this way this semester and it actually upset a bunch of students, I'll teach it another way next semester, because I am supported in making my own decisions and evolving as a teacher"? Or "we had some meetings with students in the department and decided that in the specific case of our university with its particular mix of students, we could make these changes without damaging learning"? There are other ways to handle things than a sort of "fuck those snowflake/conservative kids" and "fire the evil professor!!!" This rests on the administration, who are IMO to blame here.

Telling students to opt out is, to me, a last resort for accommodating a small number of students, because it makes them feel singled out and weird, and this is especially bad when they feel singled out and weird in society already. Again, depending on the class and the issue, sometimes that's the best solution - but if it's not necessary, why do it?
posted by Frowner at 10:40 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Being religious just seems so exhausting.
posted by schoolgirl report at 10:42 AM on January 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

I agree, Frowner, that it would have been best if this could have been resolved through conversations between students, the professor, and the department—conversations that don't have a condescending, antistudent tone. Since the student bypassed the professor, and the department, and went directly to the university administration with her complaint, though, it didn't work out that way, and the administration's (wildly disproportionate) response has driven the media coverage. Saying "yes" when you can means someone has to bring the request to you in the first place, and that didn't happen. The power dynamic that would make that option completely unappealing to a student is understandable, but if the student isn't comfortable raising the issue with the professor, how can the professor respond to it?

What about "hm, I taught it this way this semester and it actually upset a bunch of students, I'll teach it another way next semester, because I am supported in making my own decisions and evolving as a teacher"? Or "we had some meetings with students in the department and decided that in the specific case of our university with its particular mix of students, we could make these changes without damaging learning"?

I think it's uncharitable (and inaccurate) to phrase this in a way that suggests it's a hypothetical question no one has considered and not something that this specific professor has done when teaching the same material in the same community in the past, or that she wouldn't do so going forward.

There are other ways to handle things than a sort of "fuck those snowflake/conservative kids" and "fire the evil professor!!!" This rests on the administration, who are IMO to blame here.

100 percent.
posted by Anita Bath at 10:58 AM on January 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

It’s very tangential to this discussion, but I would love to know exactly why the NYT disabled comments on the linked article.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 11:01 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

second, this happened during lockdown. The first rule of teaching online is: don't do anything that can be misunderstood or seen as controversial. Your class may be a little less elegant than normal, but you have to stick to that rule.

That's not the first rule of teaching online. It's not even a rule. I say this as someone who had issues with Christian parents over queer material in Latin at a university. You sign post, you forewarn and you allow all the opt outs you can. But there's just way too much stuff that can be seen as problematic and be upsetting to students, and which may seem tangential or elidable but still is significant. And I say this as someone who is deeply sympathetic to students finding material difficult to deal with and who allows opt outs and gives warnings on syllabi and repeats them as much as possible.

I think it's fine that the student complained. It's not a bad thing to flag this. What's not fine is that someone lost a job over their complaint after doing all the right things.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 11:10 AM on January 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

I think it's uncharitable (and inaccurate) to phrase this in a way that suggests it's a hypothetical question no one has considered and not something that this specific professor has done when teaching the same material in the same community in the past, or that she wouldn't do so going forward.

I feel like most of the discussion, both here and elsewhere, has treated this as though the choice is between the professor's initial attempt at teaching the class and firing the professor out of hand if any student is unhappy - I assume that the professor revises her teaching based on experience and would probably be able to work this whole thing out on her own given a couple of semesters to try new things.

I blame the administration because the administration could easily have steered the student(s) in the direction of conversation with the professor and the department. I went to a small liberal arts college (long ago - even adjuncts were on three-year contracts and there weren't too many of those) and honestly the climate there was a lot better than Hamline sounds like (which is weird - Hamline is pretty small). Students sometimes total assholes to professors, professors were sometimes martinets, but people knew each other a bit more and conflict tended to feel more like conflict between people rather than conflict between ranks.

(I bet the NYT disabled comments because of the froth-at-the-mouth Islamophobia in them - I've seen a couple of stinkers here on metafilter, even though at least one of those has been deleted, and what I've seen on social media has been appalling.

Something I hate about this kind of situation - at the national level, so much of it is in bad faith. It's bigots eager for the chance to spew hatred of Muslims under the guise of debate - this makes it really difficult to actually solve the problem, because a lot of people want it to be a debate about Muslims. They sit around in Florida or somewhere knowing nothing at all and spew a bunch of bile about my people in my city with no effort to understand or care. It's like, these are my neighbors and a conflict with them is real, not symbolic, and if they feel bad I feel bad, even if we disagree. )
posted by Frowner at 11:18 AM on January 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Being religious just seems so exhausting.

It's really not just religion - look at all the cases where professors have been disciplined for using texts that offended or triggered students because of slurs or scenes of violence against a person belonging to a traditionally attacked population or scenes of sexual violence or depictions of colonialism or... There are cases where they really could have used a different text; but there are also cases where that specific text, or texts with that specific kind of content, are actually really crucial or otherwise worth grappling with. So then what do you do about the offense that some students might feel? How do you weigh offense versus value?
posted by trig at 11:24 AM on January 9, 2023

I think there’s a real conversation to be had about whether showing the artwork in that context was wise, but that opportunity was ruined when the instructor got fired.

I know so many instructors doing their best to meet often-vague HR/DEI guidelines (this increased a lot under covid) without any real support from the institution. The burden has been shunted almost entirely onto faculty by administrations who care mainly about their metrics.

I respect people in this thread who want to support the students and/or are suspicious of “woke run amok” paranoia, but please consider that the problem really might be worse than you think. Scapegoating faculty to appease angry/naive/unreasonable students is very, very real, and acting like it it’s all propaganda dreamed up by Fox News (or even the New York Times) is alienating.
posted by ducky l'orange at 11:25 AM on January 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

In case you didn't get a chance to read it because of the paywall, Amna Khalid's editorial ("Most of All, I am Offended as a Muslim") is also available on her substack.
posted by dismas at 11:27 AM on January 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

I blame the administration because the administration could easily have steered the student(s) in the direction of conversation with the professor and the department.

A very large part of me wonders if the administration has some sort of desire to discipline the department and show them who is boss and if the instructor was involved in any sort of union organizing, and if the firing has nothing to do with the student's complaint beyond that giving cover for the termination.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 11:33 AM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

In my experience, administrations will in fact use all kinds of well-intended initiatives as a stalking horse to weaken the bargaining position of faculty (for instance, “cultural competency” introduced as a criteria for post-tenure review, which is really just a way to show older tenured faculty the door).
posted by ducky l'orange at 11:40 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

That said, I think firings like this are more reflexive than tactical.
posted by ducky l'orange at 11:59 AM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Describing being religious as “exhausting” and calling the students “immature” is very disrespectful to the individuals involved. It comes across as a statement that is contemptuous of their beliefs and dismissive of the authenticity feelings.
posted by interogative mood at 12:19 PM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

My contempt is for cynical administrators, not students. And while it is probably unwise of me to characterize any student as “immature,” that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:28 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Glancing up thread, I see I didn’t actually use that word at all, so maybe that comment wasn’t meant for me. Apologies. I’ll sit the rest of this out).
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:54 PM on January 9, 2023

Can someone explain again why some people are against depictions of the Popehat?
posted by hypnogogue at 1:06 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

you have a class where you can talk about the image and the issues it raises and make it accessible to students another way

I appreciate the concerns you're raising here, but the idea that a text description can substitute universally (not as an explicit and limited compromise when set against another compelling concern, to permit the accomplishing of pedagogical purposes which would otherwise be thwarted) for a piece of visual art is fundamentally antithetical to the idea of art and of art history.

When the instructor explicitly says "I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture" it seems reasonable that the member of sect Y would feel called out.

If a student cannot function with a respectful, neutral reminder of the fact that not all people believe what they do, this student is simply not a candidate for secular education.

It's good that we keep foregrounded in this discussion the marginalized status of Muslims in America. The implications in this situation aren't the same as they are for, say, doing things that evangelicals would find offensive. The student in this situation is presumptively someone having a more reasonable and understandable reaction than an evangelical freaking the fuck out to learn that there's sodomy in Catullus. But in the end, all the tapdancing around cannot sublimate away the fact that you are talking about taking away everyone else's freedoms to accommodate a group that, at least in the specific instance, wants to impose its beliefs on people who do not share that belief, in a context that is supposed to aim for neutrality and freedom of learning. Given that the teacher seems to have taken significant steps to prepare students to understand what they were seeing and not to penalize students who did not wish to engage with this specific material and does not seem to have spoken of iconoclasts or Islam disparagingly, this student is, in effect, demanding that all other students not see visual depictions of the prophets and all other students not learn that not all Muslims are iconoclastic, and that is ultimately unacceptable.
posted by praemunire at 1:12 PM on January 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

(I don't blame the student, by the way, but the administration. Young people are going to have their beliefs challenged in a secular education, and they're not all going to react with the greatest perspective, maturity, and wisdom. Grown-ups, on the other hand, especially those who should have experience with these kinds of conflicts, are held to a higher standard.)
posted by praemunire at 1:15 PM on January 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

it sounds like Hamline has a whole bunch of students who are not mature enough to be at a University

Since I'm at a tech university, I like my teaching to be as evidence-based as possible, and it seems that people under 25 are not fully mature. This research is strongly supported by lots of reports of university students doing really stupid things throughout history. So I don't really know what "not mature enough" means. If you are white, male and rich, uni activity can include masturbating with the head of a dead pig, AFAIK. And most of us are old enough to know that fraternities and sports teams have done worse things that were forgiven and almost forgotten.

So what this student did was not even on the list of deplorable things, but what the administration at Hamline did was way off any acceptable behavior. So maybe they are the immature ones here.

That said, I think we need to talk about how to teach difficult subjects and to accept that we all come from different backgrounds. Academia is still very much based on norms from back when the majority of professors and students were white men, and a lot of women have internalized those norms.

When I was a student, one of the most prominent professors was a sadistic misogynist who would routinely torment female or gay male students and younger colleagues publicly, and always showed nude images of his ex-wives in his lectures for no reason. No one would accept that today. But back then, if I complained, I was a told that I was whiny, radical and needed to grow up.

You may say this is something different -- and to that I'll say maybe. I don't know.
posted by mumimor at 1:36 PM on January 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

W/r/t maturity, there’s a distinction worth drawing between maturity that is broad life experience, which many students (who may be parents, veterans, mature age students and so on) may have in great amounts, and the intellectual maturity that comes with formal education. By definition an undergraduate is intellectually immature, that’s why they are studying.

The point of a teaching University is to provide a framework for that intellectual maturation, and it should involve a consistent set of scholarship values at all levels; students should know they will be appropriately challenged, teachers should know that they will be supported, the administration should know that teachers will behave as quality educators. The seeming absence of that framework—which deals with inevitable conflicts—is the total failure, and it’s a fundamental intellectual one.

Who’d be a teacher?
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:51 PM on January 9, 2023

I think we need to talk about how to teach difficult subjects and to accept that we all come from different backgrounds

Yes, I'd like to think--for instance--that one would not nowadays casually display, e.g., a photo of a former enslaved person's naked, whip-scarred back in a history class, even though it is highly relevant both to the facts and to the culture that responded to those facts; rather, one would first discuss the context and warn the students when it was about to be shown. Nor should students to be left to wonder on their own, when introduced to Ovid, whether what looks to them entirely like rape is, in fact, considered to be rape. I can easily imagine a way of presenting the image in question here in an American classroom twenty years ago that would be deliberately disrespectful (note that I'm not saying there is never any place for religious disrespect, but it would be counter to secular pedagogical principles) and might potentially justify some discipline of the professor. These changes are good. I don't think recognizing the power of a subject is inherently at cross-purposes with teaching that subject.

But there are limits. I think it's maybe a little easier to be casual about all this if one is a software engineer in Seattle than if one has ever lived in a political environment where religious fundamentalists have ever threatened one's freedom.
posted by praemunire at 1:52 PM on January 9, 2023

Islam has strict prohibitions against idolatry in the Quran. In order to avoid the creation of an idol, artists have tended to avoid depicting living creatures in their work. Public art especially has tended to focus on geometry and abstract shapes and the dominant form of religious artwork has been calligraphy. These restrictions have been especially strong in the Sunni communities and less so in the Shi'ite community. In fact in modern Iran there are recently public murals that contain the prophet, however his face is always veiled. Historically in Iran depictions of living creatures and people has been done in a 2 dimensional, stylized way as a means for the artist to establish that they are not creating an idol. IIRC Seyyed Hossein Nasr has written about this in his book Islamic Art and Spirituality.
posted by interogative mood at 2:28 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Another thing from my youth that would be weird today: I took a course on sub-Saharan African culture, and really enjoyed it and learnt a lot. But the anti-imperialist anti-racist professor really took offence when I told her I was never able to read through Heart of Darkness or see Apocalypse Now. I mean, Joseph Conrad was an anti-imperialist in his own time. But reading the story now is pretty shocking. I have finally finished it and it is obviously a masterpiece, and so is the film. But both have a lot of underlying racist tropes, even as they are anti-racist. Because that is how it was back then.
IMO, that doesn't mean we should never read Heart of Darkness or Pippi Longstocking, but that those texts should be contextualized in classrooms where that is possible. And I don't think an online class on global art history is optimal for dealing with difficult subjects.

I'm not at all scared of controversial subjects when I teach, but I am very aware that I need to bring myself into the discussion in a real way, so I prefer doing it during tutorials or in smaller classes.
posted by mumimor at 2:35 PM on January 9, 2023

it's maybe a little easier to be casual about all this if one is a software engineer in Seattle than if one has ever lived in a political environment where religious fundamentalists have ever threatened one's freedom

I had to switch jobs within a Seattle software giant to avoid the cluster of fundamentalists who didn’t think women should have authority.
posted by clew at 2:56 PM on January 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

The point of a teaching University is to provide a framework for that intellectual maturation, and it should involve a consistent set of scholarship values at all levels; students should know they will be appropriately challenged, teachers should know that they will be supported, the administration should know that teachers will behave as quality educators. The seeming absence of that framework—which deals with inevitable conflicts—is the total failure, and it’s a fundamental intellectual one.

The problem is that there is a sizable contingent in academia that "appropriate challenge" requires pain, as the Spartan streak is well and alive in the academy. Furthermore, there's a certain set that believes that blasphemy is a good thing, that it needs to be inflicted on believers as a form of growth encouragement. These things cannot and should not be dodged.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:10 PM on January 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

None of that seems to be the case here, though. It was an Islamic art class and the instructor showed a piece of Islamic art which was created by believers who did not believe it was unacceptable to create or enjoy that particular image, and she signposted it clearly as something some might find problematic and could avoid. And then she got fired in the middle of a pandemic for that.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 3:16 PM on January 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

It was not an Islamic art class, just a general survey on global art. This is one of the points I find persuasive, actually, as expressed by someone upthread - the need to include these particular Persian works doesn't seem that compelling, given the context. It was a choice made by the instructor.
posted by anhedonic at 3:28 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

None of that seems to be the case here, though.

But it is, which is my point. A lot of the arguments saying that "this professor did everything right and still wound up getting punished for it" have been ignoring the ways that the academy is routinely abusive, in particular to students of color and of faith. And that abuse doesn't just go away just because in the specific case it wasn't happening.

If the academy wants students to have faith that it will challenge them in a way that is respectful, then the academy needs to stop defending abuse in the name of "growth".
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:31 PM on January 9, 2023

Ah. Thanks for that correction. But it's still the case that these were created by an important school and period of Islamic art, and she didn't force people to view them.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 3:32 PM on January 9, 2023

If it was an Islamic art class, it would be wrong to not address the depictions of Muhammad in an appropriate way. In a class dealing with the entire global history of art where Islamic art should be one or two of the sessions during a semester, it is a weird thing to pick out. I don't think this was a political or islamophobic choice on the side of the professor, probably more of a zeitgeist thing. She doesn't seem to be an expert on Islamic art, either.

There is a lot to talk about in Islamic art in the context of a global art class, and depictions of the Profet are not at the top of the list. I would definitely include Persian, Ottoman and Mogul art, so there would be figurative art, but the roles of geometry and calligraphy in Islamic art are obviously immensely important and would be the bulk of my lecture and any exercise/discussion.
posted by mumimor at 3:37 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Honestly, I think it kind of is an important thing to mention? It's one of the stereotypes about Islamic art, and should probably be challenged early on in the process. And, if you're mentioning it, it's not wildly out of line to show it, while also (thinking that you are) putting in place some sort of balanced way for a person to opt out.
posted by sagc at 3:40 PM on January 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

Mention, sure. Provide links, sure. Make a big production about showing it in class (in Michigan), with the only "out" being "if you don't like it stop looking now," maybe not.
posted by anhedonic at 3:43 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Make a big production about showing it in class

The professor took all reasonable precaution to ensure that no one who would be distressed by seeing the image would see it. To use that fact against them by calling it a "big production" is damned if you do, damned if you don't logic.
posted by 0xFCAF at 3:47 PM on January 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

the need to include these particular Persian works doesn't seem that compelling, given the context. It was a choice made by the instructor.

I want you to be really really really clear about what you're saying here, given the specific facts of this scenario: that this one student should have the ability to ensure that no one of any faith sees such an image in class or learns that Islam has had more than one view on representational art of the prophets. Even though it unquestionably falls within the purview of such a course (whether or not you think it's the best example, in your completely nonprofessional and non-academic opinion, is just a form of dodging the implications). You really need to get your mind around this idea that you are propounding: one student has the power to chain everyone in ignorance of a subject because they find even academic study of the topic offensive to their faith. You can't handwave because it's a minority and often-oppressed religion in the U.S. Sometimes there is an insuperable conflict between freedom and what religious fundamentalists demand, and "well, it's just some art history professor who thought this was a good thing to teach in their art history survey, how can that stand up against one student being offended to learn a fact?" is taking the fundamentalist side.
posted by praemunire at 3:57 PM on January 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

There is also the issue of the western colonial past and taking of Islamic art from Persia. One of the largest collections of Persian miniatures paintings is in the Freer /Sackler Galleries in the Smithsonian. Of course this also skews the scholarship about what is important. The collection was assembled originally by western art collectors in the late 1800s to early 1900s and what they choose to collect, highlight and preserve in some way established a hierarchy of importance.
posted by interogative mood at 4:02 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

The collection was assembled originally by western art collectors in the late 1800s to early 1900s and what they choose to collect, highlight and preserve in some way established a hierarchy of importance.

A worthwhile topic, and something that no competent art professor would consider it possible to teach properly without looking at that art, of course.
posted by praemunire at 4:04 PM on January 9, 2023

"appropriate challenge" requires pain

But...it often does? Challenge, especially to deeply-held assumptions about the world, is very often uncomfortable. That doesn't license sadism on anyone's part, of course, and that's where hazing-style professors go badly astray. But the mere fact of your feeling uncomfortable to realize that the "one man, one woman, their children" family model propounded as universal and timeless by certain sects isn't even adhered to by many important figures in the Old Testament doesn't mean that you shouldn't be taught about the subject.
posted by praemunire at 4:09 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

"if you don't like it stop looking now" is maybe the least charitable way to describe how this was signposted? I mean, come one.
posted by sagc at 4:10 PM on January 9, 2023

I want you to be really really really clear about what you're saying here, given the specific facts of this scenario: that this one student should have the ability to ensure that no one of any faith sees such an image in class or learns that Islam has had more than one view on representational art of the prophets.

Except I'm not saying that, at all. The workaround is right there and obvious, and she could have chosen to use it in deference to a population that is significantly present on campus. No one would have been deprived of anything - they would have ALL been free to look at what they wanted to look at. Instead, she chose to do it this way.
posted by anhedonic at 4:12 PM on January 9, 2023

Except I'm not saying that, at all. The workaround is right there and obvious,

You are literally saying that in an art history class an art history professor should not be free to show a relevant piece of art to the class for the purposes of lecture discussion--the standard way, for fairly obvious reasons, of teaching especially new students about the history of art--and the class should not be free to see it at that time. You are willing to let one student's religious beliefs control the curriculum for fellow students and their teachers, regardless of their own faith or lack of faith. The fact that you are unwilling to accept this is telling. I look forward to learning how firing or segregating women professors to accommodate students who think that women teaching at all, or at least teaching men, is blasphemous (not at all an imaginary hypothetical) is just a work-around.
posted by praemunire at 4:21 PM on January 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

But...it often does? Challenge, especially to deeply-held assumptions about the world, is very often uncomfortable.

There's something that any good physical trainer will teach you, that I find applicable outside the physical: discomfort is NOT pain. In fact, in physical training the conflation of discomfort and pain is dangerous, as it causes people to not recognize their body's limits and they wind up hurting themselves. But beyond the physical, the conflation of discomfort and pain winds up shutting people down and making them less receptive, especially when that pain is tied to identity (as religion so often is.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:23 PM on January 9, 2023

It isn’t one student though, the artwork is problematic for a large number, but not all Muslims. It is going to be offensive.

A worthwhile topic, and something that no competent art professor would consider it possible to teach properly without looking at that art, of course.

Out of the 260,000 thousand artifacts in the collection you’d have to hunt pretty hard to find one that showed Muhammad.
posted by interogative mood at 4:24 PM on January 9, 2023

Out of the 260,000 thousand artifacts in the collection you’d have to hunt pretty hard to find one that showed Muhammad.

The entire objective of the slide was to show that a rule many people believe is hard-and-fast is not actually universal. This math is missing the point to the maximum extent possible.
posted by 0xFCAF at 4:27 PM on January 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

the need to include these particular Persian works doesn't seem that compelling, given the context. It was a choice made by the instructor.

So what? Instructors should be free to select what they're interested in bringing to the table to discuss, within reason. That's the virtue of having different instructors rather than having a robot teach cookie cutter lessons from the exact same works at every single college. This is a survey art history class, not something that's a required class that students in such and such program must take in order to graduate.

The fact that someone might take offense to something should not be enough to shut down college level instructors from using a source. I've taken entire courses on censored literature and propaganda. Literally everything we read in them would have upset someone.

I have a feeling that this discussion would have gone differently if it were a conservative christian student getting an instructor fired over using LGBT friendly content, like Gender Queer.
posted by Candleman at 5:31 PM on January 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

You are literally saying that in an art history class an art history professor should not be free to show a relevant piece of art to the class for the purposes of lecture discussion

I would LITERALLY say that an adjunct lecturer is absolutely, positively not free to do whatever they choose in the classroom, and I know this because I actually do it for a living (if you can call it a living.) Like Prater, I've taught an arts survey, though I do music, not visual arts. So I know that it's just an endless series of choices - what to include, what to cut, how to present it, and what to ask of the students. And at the end of the day, all of those choices had better be defensible, because as an adjunct they will get rid of you at the drop of a hat and bring in some hungry grad student to take your place if you piss the students off for no good reason. That's the reality of the job and we all know that.

I currently teach at a Catholic university, so I try to be particularly conscious of what could possibly get me fired. There are so many things that could go wrong! And yet, I don't feel like I can't do my job. My job is literally to get the students to listen to a decent amount of music and not hurt anybody, and that's it. It's not a big deal.

Anyway, several people who seem to know what they are talking about have already weighed on whether they think this subject matter is essential to a global arts survey, and they seem to be saying it isn't, really. And I know that dropping a link during a zoom class is a perfectly fine way to get students to *optionally* look at something, because I've done it. Many of them are sitting at a laptop, so if they are at all interested they'll click. The idea that there is ONLY ONE way to present material is just wrong.

And spare me the slippery slope nonsense about women in the classroom etc. This is about a specific problem that has an easy solution.
posted by anhedonic at 5:35 PM on January 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Muslim Public Affairs Council has offered a "Statement of Support for Art Professor Fired from Hamline University."
posted by twsf at 7:40 PM on January 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

"Imagine saying that you wouldn't be presenting any texts from Martin Luther in your class about the history of Christianity because Catholics consider it sacrilegious to deny the divinity of the Pope. Would you be giving a fair characterization of Christianity by doing so?"

Catholics don't think the Pope is divine.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 11:05 PM on January 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

One deleted. It's obviously fine to be an atheist, and many of us are, but the post is not a poll about if you believe there is a god or not, and we've established that turning every thread related to a religious issue or topic into that discussion or "LOLreligion" jokes is not a good way to participate.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:07 PM on January 9, 2023

The Muslim Public Affairs Council has offered a "Statement of Support for Art Professor Fired from Hamline University."

And that statement is making me realize I should also provide further context, so with the caveat this is coming from a layperson and my life experience and my government-mandated religious education, some quotes from the statement and my comment:-

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).

and I want to introduce for the first time, without being oblique about it, when I say Persian I do mean Shia. And when I say Shia, I mean the religious minority that, outside of Iran, is persecuted in the general Muslim world, right down to police action and social censure. Remember the Glaswegian Muslims I mentioned? I lived nearby an Ahmadi community centre. As far as they're concerned, Ahmadis aren't Muslims, even though they're Sunni-derived. In my country, if you're a non-Iranian Shia you get arrested and sent to community rehabilitation centres. Like you're a deviant. Post-haj, Sunnis I know will talk mad shit about how Shias perform the pilgrimage. I should know, I heard them.

Now think about the rhetoric these Sudanese-American kids grew up in.

As Muslims, of course, we must respond in a calm and graceful manner as befits our religion

Per my anecdote with the Afghan delegations. Would you guys have preferred them making a big row for being served seafood? From fellow Muslims?

i really can't emphasize enough, bigotry and rightwing Islamism is being continually refreshed among the young Muslims, in part due to the Islamophobic prejudice they do receive elsewhere. I have only lived as a Western minority for short spells, but I'm also familiar with post-colonial ethnofascism that is rooted in post-Iranian revolution rhetoric and post-petroleum Saudi money. Believe me that it's complicated but it's not so complicated that you have to continually act that the most conservative reading is the most valid one. There's a reason 'ex-Muslims' keep being radicalized and pipelined into Western Islamophobic circles. Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for example) talks all manner of shit, but a lot of that comes from having to work through the trauma of her African Muslim community practices.

You guys were lucky enough Muslims were still on Twitter when those Young Muslims were about to cancel Ms Marvel because the trailers were showing her praying with nail polish. And non-Muslims for understandable reasons were circulating the hot take (I appreciate the support). But rightwing Muslims are just like those Bible college kids, as far as I'm concerned, with their manner of outrage and offence.

But remember, your minority Muslims also include other schools of thought, and the spaces they can exist in within the Muslim-specific community are already being constricted daily. But it just doesn't make the news. If Minnesota is as Muslim-heavy as described, that's a lot of institutional spaces that have cut off their oxygen supply, for being the wrong kind of Muslim. If this uni is a secular institution, then let it be secular. It's not like the adjunct threw it in like a nasty surprise. She's certainly more careful about it than I would be, but that's because I have my own hangups with my people.
posted by cendawanita at 11:46 PM on January 9, 2023 [34 favorites]

I'm going to be a cynic here and speculate that the initial complaint was premeditated. The president of the Muslim Students Association just happened to be in the this art survey class as a fourth year student (when you're usually looking to finish up your degree, not take survey courses). The president of the MSA, someone who clearly very engaged with Muslim students' needs, didn't engage with the lecturer when this was mentioned in the syllabus, and ignored the two minute content warning before the image was shown.

When I finally read all the links, this was exactly what I thought. And that is a thing every university administration should be prepared for, in this day and age. I mean, they should literally have a playbook ready for when activist students do stuff like this, a playbook that does not involve firing adjunct professors.

The institution I work at has such a thing, something like a student ombudsman. I was called as a witness in a case and quite impressed at how it was handled. Both the students and my colleague who had offended them were treated with fairness and dignity. And I realized that because it was an institutional thing, it wasn't that hard. Whereas when the "event" in the case happened, I tried to do something about it myself, and that was just a mess.

But remember, your minority Muslims also include other schools of thought, and the spaces they can exist in within the Muslim-specific community is already being constricted daily. But it just doesn't make the news. If Minnesota is as Muslim-heavy as described, that's a lot of institutional spaces that have cut off their oxygen supply, for being the wrong kind of Muslim. If this uni is a secular institution, then let it be secular. It's not like the adjunct threw it in like a nasty surprise. She's certainly more careful about it than I would be, but that's because I have my own hangups with my people.

You have an important point, and it is something I give a lot of thought in my day to day teaching practice.
But I don't think this particular professor was well-equipped for taking on those issues. And I question why she did it.
This whole issue has become relevant because of the entirely manufactured controversies, starting with the Danish cartoons. If you taught a class on Islamic art before those controversies*, the discussion of the portrait of the Profet would be a curious little element within the wider discussion of pictorial art and blasphemy in the Islamic world. Back then, it made more sense to show some of the absolutely gorgeous images of hunting and picknicking, because they show the courtly life that was the context for the paintings.
So if you want to bring up portraits of Muhammad in class, you also have to address the contemporary controversies, and would she be able to do that? Again: online? That is asking for trouble. It's not that art history classes should avoid political and contemporary issues. It's that in all teaching at university levels, you have to be grounded in facts and research, not feelings and opinions.
I even wondered if she was set up by colleagues who wanted to get rid of her, but the most likely thing is she wanted to be interesting.

*I mentioned above that I had a mentor who wanted me to specialize in Islamic art and architecture. That was back in the late nineties when I was briefly in charge of the higher level art and architecture education at an architecture school, and introduced a global perspective on the subjects, where the former professor had a narrow Christian angle (which was weird, but she was great). The chair of that department was very pleased, because he had focused on Islamic culture in his own research. The reason the Iraq war ended that project was that since the subject was new to me, I would have needed to travel extensively to see the works, and though I did try for a while, it became more and more complicated.
posted by mumimor at 2:35 AM on January 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Late to the discussion, but have been following.

What this reminds me most of is the often heated discussion about "who gets to define anti-semitism" that seems to bubble up every now and again, most recently with respect to the debacle over the IHRA definition of anti-semitism and the backlash against it, and the backlash against the backlash. One particularly problematic talking point I've seen proffered here in Canada is that the vast majority of Jews in Canada identify as Zionist, therefore one cannot be anti-Zionist without being anti-semitic. I wonder how those who argue along these lines would feel about the Hamline situation.
posted by greatgefilte at 5:40 AM on January 10, 2023

One particularly problematic talking point I've seen proffered here in Canada is that the vast majority of Jews in Canada identify as Zionist, therefore one cannot be anti-Zionist without being anti-semitic.

That's when you calmly explain that as a non-Semite you must be fair to both sides objectively and even neutral on issues of divine rights, because you aren't allowed to join either side as a non-believer anyway. Therefore you are in the same boat as their leavers or expelled members, whose existence proves a larger point about where you really stand in their minds, and why you are being generous for being neutral. Bonus for pointing out the manipulation of the double-bind. If they try to shame you further, calmly explain that you do not consider it wrong to be emotionally detached from their disputed ancient lore, and that shame for it is either weird to you, or perhaps an obvious trick to make you feel like a servant or slave to their mission.
posted by Brian B. at 7:44 AM on January 10, 2023

If the student took the class as an activist in order to be able to complain does it really matter? I can imagine other scenarios where some professor might be engaged in conduct others find outrageous and they were targeted by activists that would elicit cheers. Avoidance of the outrageous thing; doesn't make it less outrageous it just limits your ability to confront it and call it out.
IMO the main failure was with how the institution handled this situation. Their reaction to the claimed offense and their resolution of it is the real outrage. They seem to have tried to use her firing as a means of scapegoating and papering over a whole host of issues for black and muslim students on campus. This should have been a teachable moment. This isn't Charlie Hebdo, this was a long established Islamic Artwork that was created by Muslims for a Muslim audience. This was an opportunity to bring in other Muslim scholars to talk about the artwork and the issue with those on campus.
I don't think we should fault the student for attempting to bring something they saw as offensive to light, nor should we fault the teacher for failing to consider the political ramifications of the artwork and that trigger warnings were not really the right approach here.
posted by interogative mood at 8:14 AM on January 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

If the student took the class as an activist in order to be able to complain does it really matter?

Yes.

If a student, in bad faith, signs up for a class, ignores warnings in the syllabus that there's content they might find offensive and provides alternatives to viewing it, ignores warnings in the actual class that there's content they might find offensive and provides alternatives, and then proceeds to go after the instructor's job, it matters.

Avoidance of the outrageous thing; doesn't make it less outrageous it just limits your ability to confront it and call it out.

This wasn't outrageous.

Outrageous is advocating for genocide, expressing that a race is inferior, etc.

nor should we fault the teacher for failing to consider the political ramifications of the artwork and that trigger warnings were not really the right approach here.

Do you represent that a religious group should be able to censor all students from studying valid content? Yes or no. Unless there's information that's not been presented, the instructor approached the subject with a high amount of care and sensitivity. Should all college students be forbidden to learn about contraception because devout Catholics find it offensive?
posted by Candleman at 9:00 AM on January 10, 2023 [13 favorites]

I've slept on my thoughts on this, and I think we need to come back to a Rawlsian conception. A given student is born into one of a random collection of cultural backgrounds. That plus their personality, neurology, and background lead to things that are disliked and things that are distressing. Neurodivergence can make loud noises or music distressing. Phobias or cultural indoctrination can make being near a dog distressing.

Ideally, an individual should have a range of paths through life where they are not distressed, no matter their background (which my friends in education refer to as equity). Consider accommodations for neurodivergence or learning difficulties in school, quiet days at museums, scent-free buildings in workplaces, and making sure institutional dining halls have options that meet the dietary restrictions of people in the institution, whether it's keeping kosher or being allergic to peanuts. These all ensure a range of paths for individuals despite their backgrounds.

That being said, sometimes your background does limit you. Think of children born without a functional immune system who must live in hermetically sealed bubbles. We can and should still provide multiple paths for them, but their options are very limited. If your cultural background is similarly restrictive, then you may only have a few paths open to you. If a particular cultural background requires that everyone else's paths be heavily limited as well, such as white supremacy or religious prohibitions on educating women, then that cultural background may not be able to function in a pluralistic society.

Within this line of thought, if there is a class in university that includes visual stimuli that are likely to trigger a seizures in someone with epilepsy, we must provide alternate routes. If there is a class that shows images that a particular group finds distressing to see, we must provide alternate routes. If there is a piece of public art that would be distressing, we should have alternate routes through the city, and alternate entrances to businesses on the space where it's located, and those routes and entrances should be as enriching, safe, and pleasant as the one that goes by the public art.

So I guess I'm on the side of: this was signposted. If you happen to be born into a cultural background that forbids it to you, then society owes you different routes and notification that they are there, but no more than that.
posted by madhadron at 9:49 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

This wasn't outrageous. Outrageous is advocating for genocide, expressing that a race is inferior, etc.

The fact that people were outraged is strong evidence that it was in fact outrageous. Is your intention to de-legitimize the students feelings and beliefs? Why shouldn't they have the right to share their feelings and opinion? They do not control the institution's response to their objection.
posted by interogative mood at 10:31 AM on January 10, 2023

The fact that people were outraged is strong evidence that it was in fact outrageous.

how perfectly innocent. i urge you to avoid the internet at all costs.

the student undoubtedly has the right to share their feelings and opinions, and to have those feelings and opinions treated in an appropriate and even-handed way by the university administration. the rest of us are free to take whatever view we like on their feelings and opinions.

i don't think the situation is clear enough to form a settled view on whether the student's complaint was made in good faith or not (no pun intended), or what their reasons were. but it is clear enough to conclude that the adjunct is very likely to have acted appropriately and should not have been fired. if people are outraged by that, it is strong evidence that they are (at best) operating on a different set of standards to those that apply in this context, and that their outrage is therefore misplaced.
posted by inire at 10:52 AM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

how perfectly innocent. i urge you to avoid the internet at all costs.

This has nothing to do with me. This is an incident that occurred in college classroom where there are very different expectations about acceptable standards of behavior vs twitter. Showing this image broke an established, well known taboo for many Muslims. Members of the local Muslim community was outraged. When I hear people dismiss the outrage as not in good faith I hear echos of every attempt to dismiss the complaints of women and minorities -- for example "Don't be so upset, she's over-reacting, she's being an attention whore, just look at how she was dressed, etc etc."
posted by interogative mood at 11:59 AM on January 10, 2023

As much as I'm mulling cendawanita's excellent comments about conservativism, I really, really, really want to push back on the various comments that suggest that this whole thing must of course be done in bad faith by an "activist", that these are obviously right-wing kids, etc. I mean obviously it's possible that this student is some kind of far-right conservative who went in wanting to make a big fuss and isn't sincere, but having been around a lot of Minnesotan Muslim college students, that is not the first explanation that comes to my mind.

Here in the metro, there have been various conflicts between liberal and conservative Muslims and between conservative Muslims and liberal non-Muslims. But as a broad generality, people go along to get along - much more so than in Christian conservative communities. I'm sure this has something to do with general Minnesota culture stuff (being reserved actually helps!!), something to do with specific political conditions and something to do with marginalization - a lot easier to be conservative assholes when you're a majority - but don't envision the tenor of things here as just Bible Belt conservatives except Muslim.

My bet is on "here is a college student who genuinely feels disrespected and alienated by what happened, probably because although she looked at the syllabus she didn't really understand how it would play out until it happened". Like, imagine that you encounter a really taboo image for the first time in a college classroom - even if you were told to expect it, even if you thought you were ready for it, maybe you weren't ready to see it up on the wall for ten minutes while it was discussed like it was just another image by a group of people who really didn't have any feeling for the image's weight.

One of the reasons I view all this trigger warning/syllabus stuff as an imperfect solution is that people don't always know ahead of time how something is going to affect them. You don't know how something is going to play out in class, you don't know how it's going to feel, you don't know how the specific classroom conditions are going to shape the situation. I mean, we all try to be resilient and appropriate and so on, but sometimes things get intense, especially if you're young. I think it's worthwhile being thoughtful about what gets shown in class rather than just assuming that if you warn people then everything is cool, especially when you're dealing with young people.

The most likely explanation is that this is a college student who sincerely felt her feelings, right or wrong, and the university administration acted like a bunch of jerks instead of providing guidance and trying to maintain the college community.
posted by Frowner at 12:35 PM on January 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm reminded of this sad episode.
posted by dsword at 12:48 PM on January 10, 2023

The fact that people were outraged is strong evidence that it was in fact outrageous.

Do you believe that gay marriage is outrageous?
Do you believe contraception is outrageous?
Serving beef in the food hall?
Serving any meat?
Allowing women in college with men?
Teaching how to perform an abortion in med school?
Using The Satanic Verses as course material?
That getting vaccines is necessary for public health?
Should menstruating women be shoved into the appropriate hut?

You'll find people with genuine religious beliefs that would be outraged by all of those. Does that mean that they should be able to ban those things?

Is your intention to de-legitimize the students feelings and beliefs? Why shouldn't they have the right to share their feelings and opinion?

Yes, I delegitimize the belief that public colleges should not teach anything that could possibly offend people's religious beliefs. A key part of reaching adulthood is realizing the world does not revolve around you and your beliefs and that your opinions may not be as important to other people as they are to you.

People can have whatever beliefs they want and public institutions should offer reasonable accommodations for it. Allowing a student to reschedule an exam that falls on a religious holiday, for example is fine. I had some Jain friends who were excused from a few parts of vet school due to their beliefs, in ways that would have been hard to get out of without clear religious beliefs.

On the other hand, a man attending a public school and demanding that he not have to take any classes with women in it would not be a reasonable accommodation. The rights of the other students to learn supersedes that student's beliefs.

In this case, we're not talking about an instructor who told students to write 88 words in 14 lines about The Happy Merchant.

Again, I took courses where every single source we used was objectionable to someone and I benefited greatly from them. For a non-essential course, why should someone's discomfort with the subject matter allow them to veto my interest in it?

And again, expanding students' experiences and minds is what college is supposed to do. There's a lot of folklore around things that goes unchallenged. To return to Piss Christ, if you gave the average college student a 3 sentence description of it, they'd probably say it's offensive.

But give me an hour or three to really explain the piece and study it, I think we'd get a much different answer. Some people are always going to go with their visceral reaction (pee, gross), of course, but that doesn't mean that we should let them block discussion on the piece.

They do not control the institution's response to their objection.

Whether they intended to get the instructor fired or merely censored doesn't really matter; the point is that from the facts we know, a student deliberately set themselves up to be offended when the instructor had made a lot of effort to provide an out, and then complained to the administration about it in order to get them in trouble.

As I noted above, conservative, religious students deliberately taking classes to get offended and then going after the instructor, program, or school to try to get things censored or banned is an increasing trend. And it's mostly white, Christian conservatives who have been doing so. I'm against it regardless of race or religion.

Showing this image broke an established, well known taboo for many Muslims. Members of the local Muslim community was outraged. When I hear people dismiss the outrage as not in good faith I hear echos of every attempt to dismiss the complaints of women and minorities -- for example "Don't be so upset, she's over-reacting, she's being an attention whore, just look at how she was dressed, etc etc."

If this was a conservative Christian trying to block all students from learning about contraception, would you be on their side? Yes or no.

Comparing (largely) men excusing rape because of clothing to someone getting offended by a picture is pretty offensive, BTW.

One of the reasons I view all this trigger warning/syllabus stuff as an imperfect solution is that people don't always know ahead of time how something is going to affect them. You don't know how something is going to play out in class, you don't know how it's going to feel, you don't know how the specific classroom conditions are going to shape the situation. I mean, we all try to be resilient and appropriate and so on, but sometimes things get intense, especially if you're young. I think it's worthwhile being thoughtful about what gets shown in class rather than just assuming that if you warn people then everything is cool, especially when you're dealing with young people.

The student in question was a senior, so presumably ~22. The reality of the workforce that they're likely to be about to integrate into is going to be a cold shock if they they think getting someone fired for making them slightly uncomfortable is the go-to solution.

I've got my own legit PTSD triggers that I can describe in fairly nightmarish detail to anyone that really wants. I deal with things that push against them from time to time. I don't expect the world to never have anything that does so.
posted by Candleman at 1:01 PM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

It’s been observed upthread that lecturers and adjuncts have a tough row to hoe. Institutions can refuse to rehire them for any reason or no reason at all. They really don’t enjoy “academic freedom” the way tenured professors do, and they probably should be very, very thoughtful about what they put on their syllabi.

She made a risky choice, and I do not doubt that the institution is legally free to not rehire her.

But there’s what’s legal and then there’s what’s right, and I think intentions matter a lot.

I don’t know if the student was taking the class to “gather evidence” (my own experience is that some students really do this, and I think it is often deeply misguided and corrosive to communities, but it may not be the case here). I am more troubled by the president’s claim that the firing was justified because showing the image was “undeniably Islamaphobic.” It is simply not clear at all to me that this is the case. Surely there was some other way of addressing these concerns besides firing her.

If the school wants to enforce strict codes of what is and is not too controversial for the classroom, I wish they’d put it all in writing, lay out their best practices in crystal-clear language, and not move the goal posts after the fact. And it would be really helpful if part of orientation for first-year students emphasized reading your syllabus and acknowledging/ abiding by any content warnings (If this starts to sound lawyerly, maybe that’s the world we’re living in). But I don’t expect institutions to do any of this. I expect institutions to continue scapegoating faculty.
posted by ducky l'orange at 1:06 PM on January 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

Frowner, I am curious what specific changes you'd like to see made, apart from just removing the image from the course. If nobody can know ahead of time how offended they'll be, how can you show them *anything*, even with warnings?
posted by sagc at 1:09 PM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

OK, so I became very curious about what type of program this course is part of, and as far as I can see, Hamline only has studio art programs. So no Art History major, just art history as part of a studio education. I couldn't find a broader program that might include arts as a minor element, but I might be wrong about that. For reasons, art schools usually don't teach art history at a very advanced level. When I mentioned above that I was in charge of art and architectural history on the advanced level, it might have sounded impressive, but I had 8-12 students at a school with 1000 students at the time. It's a niche.

Right now, there is a huge international activist movement among art students where they challenge authority specifically on race ( sometimes religion) and climate. We have previously discussed the thing where art students throw food on paintings. I am pretty sure this is part of that. The student who complained is probably now an international celebrity. I'll reiterate that it is in part because of COVID lockdown, and obviously also because of the police violence and consequent BLM movement.

The way the art scene works, one has to take this seriously. It doesn't have to make sense, because art is not always about making sense. (Art is also not always about provocation, but that is another topic).

I personally find these situations hard to handle, but again, the university should have set up a strategy because it is a reality they need to handle and it will be that way for quite a while.

It makes good sense that the department wanted to make it clear that portrayals of Muhammad is an Islamic tradition and not only a Western liberal provocation and that the students need to understand the nuances. But that is not an issue that can be handled by an adjunct professor in one session within a introductory course. A better way would be to have a seminar type thing, where the top experts and activists in the community gather to present the students with all the dimensions of the issue, including both facts about the contemporary controversy and facts about the pictorial tradition in Islamic art. And I would definitely place that seminar in the third or fourth year of the program.

Finally, if I have guessed this correctly, Ms Lopez Prater may be seen by some students of color as a reactionary figure. Don't misunderstand me, I don't think she is that at all. But I have encountered activist art students and their world view is special. To put it nicely.
posted by mumimor at 1:54 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

But I have encountered activist art students and their world view is special. To put it nicely.

Oh yes. Yes it is.
posted by ducky l'orange at 1:59 PM on January 10, 2023

One of the reasons I view all this trigger warning/syllabus stuff as an imperfect solution is that people don't always know ahead of time how something is going to affect them

As a person with an unusual trigger and a mental health problem diagnosed as a phobia (before PTSD was a common diagnosis or even used outside military trauma), I agree that people don't know in advance everything that will trigger them. I wouldn't expect to encounter a triggering stimulus in art history class, but I didn't expect to encounter one watching Downton Abbey either, and I sure did. I ended up curled up in the sofa in a little ball, trying not to cry, shaking, and my husband had to turn off the TV.

I suppose someone could experience that level of distress by seeing something that they find religiously offensive, but part of the point of content warnings is to prepare yourself for things you may find triggering or to opt out. I get annoyed when I read about people saying that such-and-such topic can't be included in the corpus of learning because it might trigger someone but here's a great example where a professor repeatedly (in the syllabus and the lecture) warned that potentially upsetting content was coming, the student opted in, and then took no responsibility for ignoring the warnings. I'm sorry the student was upset but I wish I'd gotten any warning at all for any number of things I've been triggered emotionally and physically by. It's hard for me to have patience with people who ignore warnings and then get mad that the thing they were warned about happened and it was distressing.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 2:25 PM on January 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

When you feel the need to issue a trigger warning about some content you probably should consider how important it is to the activity and if it is really necessary to share it in the classroom.

Trigger warnings are given for students to prepare and, if possible within the structure of the class, avoid material that they may find difficult not to control what's taught, and also to let them think about whether this is the class for them not as a marker of subjects that should be avoided.

Here's a list of a few of the things that I've given trigger warnings for: sexual violence, violence, cruelty towards animals, depictions of genitalia, nudity, depictions of slavery, images of human remains, ethnic slurs, and use of divine names. All of these are considered potentially problematic for individuals or some groups. You try also to flag classes where, for example, you'll have an excess of something or deal in particular with it. But dealing with any period of human history or art has got something problematic in it. I'm intensely sympathetic with those who struggle in class to deal with some material and allow opt outs all the time, but I doubt there's much you can teach in the humanities without attaching a trigger warning somewhere. It needs to be there in the syllabus, but at some point unless it's a required class (where it becomes much trickier and there is a different onus on the department and instructor), students have to also make the decision about the material and whether it's for them.

A considerable number of Muslim scholars and individuals have weighed in to say that the instructor should not have been fired, and how offended they are at that happening, so it's important also not to issue blanket statements about how unforgiveably offensive and brutalizing an act showing this image was. It's a part of Islamic art, even if some now find it blasphemous.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 2:02 AM on January 11, 2023 [14 favorites]

To add to this: yes, there are some things that are perhaps better avoided in class or that have aged poorly or should really be dropped depending on your positionality as an instructor, but that's an entirely different issue than trigger warnings. Conservative scholars have been arguing they're about censorship for years, but from most perspectives they're about giving students pre-warnings and allowing them to avoid certain materials that would unnecessarily make taking a class traumatizing and impede their learning.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:01 AM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Something I haven't really mentioned because the context is different is that if a professor here said "I really need to show you an image of Muhammad", they might as well put a big shiny sign on their hat saying: I am a racist and a bigot and I am proud of it. But I don't know or understand the context in this case.

I don't mean that in the sense that I believe everyone who believes academic freedom, free speech and art-historical knowledge is a racist. I mean it in that very literal sense that if someone did it here, including trigger warnings etc., they would self-identify as a (culturally) conservative culture warrior and be openly using their course as a weapon in the culture wars. (The parenthesis is about people who may be hard socialists when it comes to economic issues, but at the same time believes immigrants are undermining our society). Adjunct teachers have been not-rehired for that AFAIK.
They might do the "I am not a racist, but..." or the "my sister is married to a muslim, but...", but we all know those people.

This experience certainly colors my questions about this and I hope we will learn more about context further on.
posted by mumimor at 9:50 AM on January 11, 2023

If it turns out the lecturer was doing this as a culture war stunt, then that would be deeply unsympathetic.

I’ve had professors who were truly irresponsible and who relished blowing their students’ minds in the name of being… anti-bourgeois? Anti-middle America? Anti-normie? Just a whole lot smarter than you? They often saw themselves as aligned with anti-colonial and anti-racist values, but also saw transgression as a kind of sacrament and thought you were a big baby if that hurt your feelings. I think they’re all retired now.

Obviously there are angry, reactionary right wing culture warrior professors out there too, and maybe she’s one of them. We’ll see.

My guess is she’s an earnest academic who believed that a college classroom is a place to get the comprehensive overview, yes, but also to explore paradoxes and contradictions, and that the students are generally game for that, provided you observe the recommended practices.
posted by ducky l'orange at 10:47 AM on January 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

When you feel the need to issue a trigger warning about some content you probably should consider how important it is to the activity and if it is really necessary to share it in the classroom. A verbal / pre-written content warning before a class or before content is shown does carry the problem that participants in the class can often see when someone opts out. I think people should also be careful that they are treating the subject matter with respect and care. Unfortunately it always falls into the same category as other forms of obscenity — people know it when they see it.

Couldn't agree more. But what evidence do you have that the professor hadn't considered that showing the content was important and had educational value? I'd argue a content warning is prima facie evidence that the the impact has been considered and that the professor felt it necessary. Particularly if it's a content-specific warning given for two specific slides, rather than "this art history class will show images of human nudity".

You say that the class can often see when someone opts out. How would the participants in an entirely online class -- which is the case in this situation -- notice another student has minimized their zoom window?
posted by Superilla at 8:04 PM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

@kshahrooz: Lord please save us from Westerners who are so obsessed with protecting us brown folk that they force us to live the very things we escaped

I'll spell it out: in my circles it's a bit of a bitter joke that escaping religious persecution and searching for a better life aren't always the same thing and it's always ironic to find the same damn people from back home then perpetuate the structures they left. The only difference is the levers of power they can access. So sure, to outsiders, 'all' of us or our 'community' look so easy-going because not until very recently there's little meaningful access to institutional power. So it feels harmless. (To use as an example, I had this at the back of my mind when I was observing Minnesota Congressperson Ilhan Omar having to be led by her metaphorical hands before she bought a clue about the antisemitism she was repeating, because that was her blind spot. She was a grown woman, but it was just overlooked before that, isn't it?)
posted by cendawanita at 8:15 PM on January 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

Another academic writing for New Lines: Islam and the Case Against Cultural Amnesia

But it seems to me the incident offers a deeper lesson. To explain what I mean, we need to look closer at Rashid al-Din and his “Compendium of Chronicles” and the context in which the work was written.

[...]
By contrast, the “Compendium” is an effort to reconnect the present with the past after all the chaos and destruction brought about by the Mongol conquests. It directly confronts the whole scene of human history, including recent calamities, making them intelligible and worthy of memory rather than oblivion.

Rashid al-Din weaves the Mongol conquests into the larger tapestry of Muslim history. He is surprisingly objective about the Mongols and their destructive methods, but also celebrates their conversion to the true religion, just as he himself had converted from Judaism, probably when he was about 30. The Mongol rulers of Iran were treated respectfully as individual persons, not simply as impersonal forces of nature sent to chastise the Muslim world. The life and times of each khan were illustrated by portraits, as were those of former rulers both before and after Islam. The painters themselves took inspiration from Chinese techniques — a willingness to imitate other cultures in keeping with the best features of the Islamic Golden Age.

It's not 'just' miniatures. It's not 'just', oh you can find something else not involving portraiture. If my fellow Muslims can't even provide the respect to their own history AND living brethren, why are you coddling them?

The dim view of Islamic patrimony cultivated by Ibn Taymiyya and Abd al-Wahhab came to prevail in many places. It is because of them that many Muslim shrines and mosques all over the world were whitewashed, and a large amount of Islamic art effaced. Comparisons with the Byzantine Iconoclasm (726–842) come to mind, as do the worst excesses of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. Consider the looting of the National Museum of Afghanistan by the Taliban and al Qaeda, or the destruction of Muslim shrines and mausoleums by Ansar Dine at Timbuktu in Mali. These were UNESCO World Heritage sites, and Timbuktu had been a center of Islamic learning for much of its history, still home to thousands of medieval Arabic and African manuscripts which had never been edited, studied or translated. But they were destroyed in the 2010s.

Herein lies the deeper lesson of the Hamline incident.

----

(Anyway, for 'fun', if you have the cultural fluency, try and see on Twitter and guess which section of Islam the ones who have objected to the religious argument that it's offensive are from and then track the replies and QTs and guess which sect are those who would be insulting and disagreeing with them)

((For extra fun if you have close proximity to the community, try and find out how much cultural practices of their own that somehow mysteriously no longer practiced but maybe you dimly recalled it was around not ten years or more ago.))
posted by cendawanita at 8:29 PM on January 11, 2023 [11 favorites]

and I want to introduce for the first time, without being oblique about it, when I say Persian I do mean Shia. And when I say Shia, I mean the religious minority that, outside of Iran, is persecuted in the general Muslim world, right down to police action and social censure. Remember the Glaswegian Muslims I mentioned? I lived nearby an Ahmadi community centre. As far as they're concerned, Ahmadis aren't Muslims, even though they're Sunni-derived. In my country, if you're a non-Iranian Shia you get arrested and sent to community rehabilitation centres. Like you're a deviant. Post-haj, Sunnis I know will talk mad shit about how Shias perform the pilgrimage. I should know, I heard them.

To be even more explicit, police action and social censure doesn't plumb the whole depths. The way that the Saudi government treats its Shia minority is barely short of genocidal. The way that Saudi funded / supported Daesh has acted and acts towards Shia in Syria is full-on genocide. I remember at school hearing someone say that he thought Shia were kuffar and that he wished they would all die (ok, this was a weird guy and that wasn't a common sentiment but still...). In Pakistan, even saying that Ahmadis are Muslims is illegal and Ahmadis are killed for "acting" too Muslim.

In general, I'm always a bit worried that discussions like this always seem to frame this in a very post-Christian sort of way (secular, liberal understandings of free-speech and desacralised understandings of art as purely aesthetic versus conservative, religious dogmatism and the mystification of art). In that framing Islam can only ever be regressive, oppressive, or irrelevent. It's never a place where interesting discussions are happening. Even in the articles in this post, most of the authors are people for whom an image could really never have any personal religious significance for good or ill and for whom Islam is a thing to be studied rather than lived and explored. My suspicion is that there's lots of debate about how to walk the line between accommodating difference and proper observance in western Muslim circles and I'd love to read more of that sort of analysis. My suspicion is that it might have solutions beyond just accepting or rejecting the postmodern Western understanding of art as being of purely of aesthetic or historical significance.

The reality is that American academia is a post-religious place for the most part. Oh sure, there's people pop into the church at Easter with their parents or keep the occasional High Holiday but being a not-just-cultural, actively believing member of *any* religion as an American college professor or administrator is a bit like really being into WWE. An amusing personality quirk at best and slightly eyebrow-raising. As such, there isn't any kind mental hinterland that administrators have to relate to sincere professions of faith or religious feeling. They always have to treat them at a distance and as a result either under- or over-react because the genuine emotional connection that makes shared understanding possible isn't there.

It reminds me of all the AskMe questions where people end up attending some kind of religious service and are absolutely petrified that they will do something massively offensive. Meanwhile, the first time I ended up in very Orthodox Jewish Shul, separated from my then-girlfriend who I'd only been dating for a few weeks and with a bunch of strangers among the men, I thought "oh god, I'm sure to put my foot in it somehow" and meanwhile all the old boys around me spent the whole service talking about football. When I relayed that to a friend, he asked me why I was surprised since a regular Sunday church service is more or less the same, even among / especially among people who are regular and genuinely believing attendees. The thing is, I didn't in fact have the experience of going regularly to church or to any other religious service so I didn't have the emotional framework for it.

I think there's an analogy here, academic administrators are themselves so alienated from religious experience of any kind that they have no anchor point for examining things that some students find offensive. Probably there is *nothing* that they would find religiously offensive but they know that, "who cares, get over it" is not an acceptable response so like a car driving on an iced-over track they panic and spin exactly the other way. I would be willing to bet that an administrator who had religious feelings of their own that they had found genuinely disturbed in the past by someone else's art (a Christian made uncomfortable by Life of Brian or maybe more appositely The Last Temptation of Christ, maybe?) would have been able to handle this more maturely.
posted by atrazine at 3:41 AM on January 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

The reality is that American academia is a post-religious place for the most part. Oh sure, there's people pop into the church at Easter with their parents or keep the occasional High Holiday but being a not-just-cultural, actively believing member of *any* religion as an American college professor or administrator is a bit like really being into WWE.

This is really, really dependent on where you are, what departments you are in, and what religions you are talking about. I know a lot of somewhat observant* Jews and Christians who are academics in both Canada and the US. Less observant Muslims, but there are also less from that background in the academy. I'm in the Humanities though - I can't really speak to other areas of the university with as much knowledge because I don't have to work around scheduling things with them.

In the sense that some are highly observant, others less so, but all attend religious services on a more or less regular basis.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 4:02 AM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's fair lesbiassparrow, I should have been clearer that my experience is pretty restricted to coastal universities, either liberal arts or research.
posted by atrazine at 7:38 AM on January 12, 2023

A local update: Hamline student, former instructor debate displaying the Prophet Muhammad’s image

(As this is a story about images, I found it hard not to notice how many of the online reports intentionally focus on that of the student at the center of the story, sometimes adding that of the president of Hamelin, and then the note at the bottom of this article "Erika Lopez Prater denied a request to provide a photo".)
posted by progosk at 2:47 AM on January 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

"A trigger warning means you're going to do harm" does kind of put the instructor in a bind, doesn't it?
posted by sagc at 6:48 AM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

More commentary:
Academic Freedom Is Not a Matter of Opinion (The Atlantic)
Hamline University’s Controversial Firing Is a Warning (Slate)
posted by twsf at 11:28 AM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

The challenge is, if you're trying to be considerate of a group you don't belong to, you necessarily need an abstraction of what the group wants.... and all the members of the group don't agree with each other.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:47 AM on January 14, 2023

CAIR Announces Official Position on Hamline University Controversy, Islamophobia Debate

In its statement, CAIR reaffirmed its longstanding policy of discouraging the display of images of the Prophet while also noting that the academic study of ancient paintings depicting him does not, by itself, constitute Islamophobia. CAIR also said that it has seen “no evidence” that former Hamline University professor Erika Lopez Prater had bigoted intent or engaged in Islamophobic conduct in the classroom.

posted by bleary at 2:48 PM on January 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

That’s interesting because the local CAIR chapter played a role getting the professor fired.
posted by interogative mood at 3:57 AM on January 17, 2023

University of Minnesota Art History Faculty Statement on Recent Events at Hamline University
posted by Anita Bath at 9:34 AM on January 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

My suspicion is that it might have solutions beyond just accepting or rejecting the postmodern Western understanding of art as being of purely of aesthetic or historical significance.

Metamodernism? It looks like a way of blending utopian modernism, relativistic post-modernism, while avoiding the absurdity of calling it post-postmodernism. Metamodernism promises something like "ironic detachment with sincere engagement" to quote from the article. Keep in mind these are all describing past trends as a way to tie them together, not determining any structured outlook to live by or through, which was religion.
posted by Brian B. at 9:40 AM on January 17, 2023

NYT: After Lecturer Sues, Hamline University Walks Back Its ‘Islamophobic’ Comments: In an about-face, the school said that using the term was “flawed” and that respect for Muslim students should not have superseded academic freedom.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:15 PM on January 17, 2023

Star Tribune is reporting that per the complaint, a department leader initially told López Prater "it sounded like you did everything right."
posted by creepygirl at 9:19 PM on January 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't think it was ever posted here, so -- AAUP, the largest advocacy group for U.S. professors, did come out against Hamline's actions, as well.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:27 AM on January 18, 2023

LOL Hamline's lawyers have told them that they are gonna be out a lot of money and they are definitely trying to walk back a lot of their statements (while not actually apologizing to Lopez Prater or reinstating her).

So much money. I'm amazed their lawyers passed on the original statement about her actions being “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful, and Islamophobic.”
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:24 AM on January 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

If the tides deservedly turn for the adjunct, then let me the first to advance my sympathies to that poor student: at least when I was a precocious sunni Muslim girl who thought i was raised on fairly solid religious education, the moments when it was revealed my understanding was based on a prejudiced and sectarian reading of our faith, i didn't find myself standing in for an episode in the culture wars at the national level, especially as a minority. For that I'm sorry this is the path the story took.
posted by cendawanita at 10:09 AM on January 18, 2023 [17 favorites]

The College Arts Association (CAA), the largest professional organization for art historians, released a statement yesterday:

CAA has been following the termination of Professor Erika López Prater at Hamline University. As of last Friday, the Board of Trustees at the university has been engaged in a review of institutional policies, including those focused on academic freedom and inclusion. CAA strongly urges the Board and the administration to uphold the tenets of academic freedom with respect to Dr. López Prater for their public statements that have defamed and damaged her person and her professional reputation.

Academic freedom is a core principle of both Hamline University’s mission and CAA’s charter, and Dr. López Prater’s termination is a tacit rejection of everything that principle stands for in higher education. Beyond an infringement on academic freedom, Hamline’s actions are a dangerous precedent of academic administrators endorsing one side of a religious controversy.

Hamline University’s characterization of Dr. López Prater’s action as “Islamophobic” contradicts widely held definitions of the term from prominent public interest advocacy groups, including the national organizations CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), and MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Council). Dr. López Prater met and exceeded pedagogical standards for teaching by providing advance written and verbal notice of the intention to illustrate her lecture with two images of the Prophet Muhammed. Additionally, the images she used are historic and symbolic works of art of significance, essential to teaching the long and rich art history of Islam.

CAA calls upon Hamline University, President Fayneese Miller, and AVP David Everett to apologize to Dr. López Prater formally and publicly. Furthermore, this would be the appropriate time to affirm their commitment to both the informed pedagogy that Dr. López Prater demonstrated, and the academic freedom to pursue truth that all professors should expect. CAA speaks on behalf of a membership base that is facing increasingly precarious standards of employment—which is the very reason Hamline University was so easily able to terminate Dr. López Prater. Amends would be made if they recommitted to a tenure-line position for the teaching of art history.

posted by Ahmad Khani at 6:33 PM on January 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

There's also the fact that the university viewed the syllabus for the class and rubber stamped it, but then took issue with it as though it were blatantly and obviously offensive. If it was so clearly flawed why did they let it pass?
posted by Ferreous at 10:34 PM on January 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Because everyone was fine with it until a student complained (despite all precautions taken). Once a Muslim student publicly complained, the school knew this would make the media and immediately threw the professor under the bus because it's the 2020's and life goes exactly like this.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:23 AM on January 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Argues Kathy Johnson Bowles, head of a philanthropy consulting firm, in Inside Higher Ed,
"Can Art History Be Taught Without Someone Becoming Angry?
The answer is no, and here’s why that’s OK."
posted by twsf at 9:05 AM on January 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Here is an interview with López Prater filmed ten days ago, in the Khanversation series published by prof. M. Khan (of U. Delaware): Hamline University: Islamophobia vs Academic Freedom |Prof Fired over Prophet Art tells her story
posted by progosk at 7:46 AM on January 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wouldn't bet on a lawsuit giving her a huge payout. She was in the particularly vulnerable spot as I understand it since she was a semester by semester contract employee, not a full time employee of the University. Lawsuits take forever and depending on the terms of her last contract she might be forced to accept binding arbitration and some limited recovery for the damages. IMO American courts seem to have no problem forcing workers to accept some low ball settlement. There is also a risk in a trail that an email, text or other communication would be uncovered that showed her to be actually anti-Muslim/discriminating against Muslim students, or could be spun that way in court.
The most frustrating thing is I doubt the administrators will end up with any consequences from their own horrible actions. The whole of academia will be painted as too liberal and overly politically correct and this will be another battle in the culture wars for the right wing to tear it down so we can wallow in ignorance. The instructor has had their career derailed and has been doxed to the world. The Muslim and other minority students on campus will not see an improvement in their campus experience.
posted by interogative mood at 9:20 AM on January 23, 2023

Here is an interview with López Prater filmed ten days ago, in the Khanversation series published by prof. M. Khan

Thanks for sharing, it was a very interesting discussion. It hasn't exactly changed my mind and it won't change my practice as a teacher, but it did bring new perspectives. And it confirmed my suspicion that there might be local issues that dr. Prater wasn't aware of.

I'm starting a global art history class in just over a week from now. And I won't get fired if I show those paintings. But I will loose every single Muslim student, and I can't see the point of that. What I will show is masterpieces of Islamic art and I will explain how Islam informed those works. Sorry, I'm not here to evangelize for anything, not even free speech.

What sometimes happens is that students open up to me about their worries and doubts, and then we have a one-on-one discussion. I feel that is a great time to introduce complexities and contradictions.
posted by mumimor at 1:14 PM on January 23, 2023

Kareem Shaheen, "Why the Media Didn’t Publish the Muhammad Paintings at the Heart of the Hamline Controversy," New Lines Magazine:

The decision to include an image of the paintings in our piece was not an easy one. Internally, the magazine’s founding editors debated for hours whether to include them or not. The main argument against inclusion was relatively straightforward — depictions of Muhammad in the past, as in the Danish cartoons and the case of the French Charlie Hebdo magazine, had inflamed public sentiment and directly led to violence and loss of life.

This argument, however, falls flat with a cursory understanding of the subject matter. The paintings were not derogatory, like the cartoons were (in fact, in one of them, Muhammad’s face is obscured). As Gruber explained, the paintings were in fact Islamophilic rather than Islamophobic and represented an established practice of revering Muhammad through art. Still, there are of course many who would object to publishing any depiction of Muhammad, regardless of its purpose. Our decision brushed aside this hardline view and followed what we believed was also editorially essential: simply to present the full picture to readers without omission. As Gruber’s essay argued, the university’s ham-fisted response to the controversy also privileged a hardline and fundamentalist view regarding artistic expression, one that has come to dominate the mainstream perception of such controversies.

This is harmful not only to the cause of academic freedom but to the Muslim students who ostensibly are being protected by the university and media outlets’ decision to eschew publishing the paintings. Many academics, including Muslim ones, came out in support of the lecturer, saying they themselves show such images in their classes. By making a controversy out of the images, the university and the media undermined the real instances of Islamophobia that take place every day and instead portray Muslims as thin-skinned, a perception that is strengthened by the media’s kowtowing to complaints like Hamline’s, however silly they are.

posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:39 PM on January 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

And somewhere in Florida or here in Texas an evangelical Christian student is being prepped by a team of lawyers on how to shut down an English literature or palaeontology class.
The Academy - lovingly forging weapons to be used against it.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:58 PM on January 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

After an Art Controversy, Hamline Faculty Urge Their President to Resign (SL The Nation)

The resolution engages these issues directly, opening with

We, the faculty of Hamline University, stand for both academic freedom and the education of all students. We affirm both academic freedom and our responsibility to foster an inclusive learning community. Importantly, these values neither contradict nor supersede each other.

The article also goes into the background of Hamline's previous failures to be an inclusive school:

One faculty member I spoke to pointed to the fall of 2019, when white Hamline athletes recorded a video of themselves singing a song that including the n-word. Many students of color said the response was insufficient and criticized a panel to deal with the incident that was composed entirely of white faculty. The administration promised conversations, but students demanded action. A 2021 article in The Oracle, the student newspaper, noted the lack of halal food on campus. A year later, despite pledges from the university to do better, that was still the case. A member of the Hamline community told me students have shared that there is now a single halal station in the dining hall, but that it is usually just a sign saying “Halal Station,” with no food to be seen.

It honestly sounds to me like Lopez Prater was fired because there's nothing easier in academia than firing an adjunct. All of the other stuff people were asking for to make Hamline more inclusive would involve actual work, or spending money, or pissing off someone that they deemed important (unlike adjunct professors).
posted by creepygirl at 6:48 PM on January 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

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