They defended their handling of the controversy
The Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the Hamline issue last week.
Hamline administrators, who have previously shared information mostly through written statements, granted an interview to The Chronicle. In it they defended their handling of the controversy, in which Erika López Prater, the lecturer, saw her contract go unrenewed after the course ended.
The CHE is reminding us that non-renewal of an adjunct’s contract is different from firing, because adjuncts are always subject to non-renewal of contract – they don’t have tenure. It’s a well known academic scandal that colleges and universities take advantage of that difference more and more, because it’s so much cheaper and more convenient for them.
Hamline administrators told The Chronicle on Friday that what happened in the art-history class, and their view of teaching depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, had been inaccurately reported.
But their comments raised more questions about the series of events that continues to roil the small campus.
In early October, López Prater showed two artistic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, dating to the 14th and 16th centuries, in an online session of a class on global art history. Knowing that many Muslim people object to any visual representation of the Prophet, López Prater has said she included a warning about the images both on the course syllabus and orally in the class itself before showing the pictures.
…
But Marcela Kostihova, dean of Hamline’s College of Liberal Arts, said on Friday that was not true. “The images were already on screen from the moment that the lecture began,” she said in a video call with The Chronicle.
Sigh. You’d think they were plutonium, or a dish of Corona virus. Anyway the CHE couldn’t verify the claim.
The Chronicle provided this version of events to David Redden, a lawyer for López Prater, but neither responded in time for publication. Hamline administrators have a student’s recording of the class and cited it to support their claims about López Prater, but declined to provide a copy of it to The Chronicle.
Why?
The Oracle, Hamline’s student newspaper, obtained a video of the same class last year, but appeared to differ in reporting what it showed: “The professor gives a content warning and describes the nature of the depictions to be shown and reflects on their controversial nature for more than two minutes before advancing to the slides in question.”
So is Hamline just lying to the CHE? I don’t know.
Miller and other administrators have said plainly that they disagree with how López Prater handled the class. Miller was one signer on an email that said “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”
Where does that end? Should respect for religious students supersede the teaching of biology, astronomy, physics? Most learning and scholarship is a rival to the core teachings of religions, so where do universities draw the line? These are two warring epistemologies, and the differences are too basic to be resolved. Religions are free to just make shit up, and then declare it to the followers without any form of evidence or argument or other reason to believe it. Secular knowledge, not so much. If secular universities decide that religion gets to silence all claims it doesn’t like, secular universities might as well pack up and go home.
It may be time to discuss changing the name of the university. After all, ham is haram. Maybe Chickenline University?
It’s so McCarthyesque to claim there’s evidence proving something and then not providing it. I earlier heard about a video showing something mumblemumblemumble and that it wasn’t available to be seen yet. Defaming your faculty is not a good look for a liberal arts university.
How about Chickenshitline? How much of this is out of any actual “respect,” and how much of it is fear that someone might bring automatic weapons on campus and do a Charlie Hebdo on the admin offices?
Why is refusing to show a legitimate artwork “respecting Muslim students?” Showing it and expecting them to either learn from it or recognize that their religious objections are personal ones seems much more respectful.
“Since you’re an atheist, we aren’t going to show Carravagio’s “Entombment of Christ” in art class today.”
“What? Do you think I’m a baby?”
It seems more respectful to us, but that’s probably because we have a secular mindset. A theistic (let alone theocratic) mindset considers these taboos ordained by their god and therefore a crime of some sort against that god and his (it’s always his) followers. That kind of “respect” is closer to obedience than actual respect.
The mindset of the administrations in these cases is similar to that of trans enforcers. It is imperative to express instant passionate furious support of the disrespected and condemnation of the evil people who do the disrespecting. Nothing matters more.
No one knows what Mo looked like, so I can draw a stick figure and label it Mo and be accused of hurting religious feelings. Perhaps I could draw pictures of Mo, in bed with Jesus, who again, nobody knows what he looked like, and make pithy comments about the folly of religion. More hurt religious feelings.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, students could accept that they are attending courses to learn new and challenging things and to expand the horizons of their minds.
The rise and rise of the airheads continues apace.
In my experience, the school will tend to assume the student complaining is right. At my school, the professor is not contacted before action is taken, promises are made, and disciplinary procedures are undertaken. I have fought back on a couple of occasions, but the only reason I get anywhere is that my supervisor has (recently) been a professor and realizes students don’t always see it correctly, or report it correctly. It’s possible they’re not lying so much as stating what the student told them; it would appear possible they did no investigation.
If it really is an online course, that material should still be available for review. My online courses stick around for at least three years.
Unfortunately, the answer is all too often yes…and, of course, trans. So far, I have not changed my biology class from teaching that humans are dimorphic, and that it is the presence or absence of the y chromosome that determines sex. Since this is my last semester, if trouble comes up this semester, I don’t give a damn. I’ll just shrug and say so what? (It likely will; I have a trans student in my class that I know from another class; she/her/they/them/ze/zir may very well try to cause trouble).
And it’s not just religious or trans. It’s political. It’s economical. I was called on the carpet once for teaching about the environmental impacts of agriculture in my Environmental Science class…which was sort of a shock, since I talked about the environmental impacts of the petroleum industry for all the years I taught in Texas, and no administrator bothered to call me and tell me to stop it. By the way, if you think I stopped teaching about the environmental impacts of agriculture – and that ethanol is NOT a green fuel – you don’t know me very well.
It’s all part and parcel of the derailing of education by feelings. Don’t say anything that offends or annoys anyone. Don’t fail students. Test them only the way they want to be tested. Remember, they know more about what is right for them than we do.
I call bullshit, and I’m not alone.