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Some of you may remember this from last month – art history professor Erika Lopez Prater was fired from Hamline U.\u00a0 after showing the above painting of Mohammed in her art history class.<\/p>\n
Erika L\u00f3pez Prater said she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of the prophet to a global art history class, according to a report in The New York Times.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n
Ms L\u00f3pez Prater said she had warned in her syllabus<\/strong>\u00a0(emphasis added – Ed.) that images of holy figures, including the prophet and the Buddha, would be shown in the course.<\/p>\n
She also asked students to contact her with any concerns and said no one did.<\/p>\n
Before showing the image in class, she says she warned students that the painting would be displayed in a few minutes\u2019 time, in case anyone wanted to leave.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So she warned students REPEATEDLY months in advance and offered help if there was any conflict… and received no responses.<\/p>\n
A senior in the class had complained to the university\u2019s administration, according to the report.<\/p>\n
The complainant, Aram Wedatalla, told a school newspaper in December that she had felt disrespected.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018This can\u2019t be real\u2019,\u201d said Ms Wedatalla, who in a public forum described herself as Sudanese.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a Muslim and a Black person, I don\u2019t feel like I belong, and I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever belong in a community where they don\u2019t value me as a member, and they don\u2019t show the same respect that I show them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I suspect saying “if you are Sudanese at an American school, maybe you DON’T belong” would trigger someone, so I won’t. Suppose suggesting the student actually READ the syllabus is unreasonable, too.<\/p>\n
The complaint was subsequently supported by other Muslim students who were not in the course but demanded action and said the class was an attack on their religion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Independent<\/a><\/p>\n
So ONE student was offended. The rest just felt they should be offended because, you know, Islam and feewings. But, there is a potential bright spot:<\/p>\n
The incident sparked outrage from free speech advocates. The Hamline administration’s\u00a0 assertion that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom,” was subject to particular criticism. As Amna Khalid, a history professor at Carleton College wrote<\/a> of the incident in The Chronicle of Education<\/em>, “Barring a professor of art history from showing this painting, lest it harm observant Muslims in class, is just as absurd as asking a biology professor not to teach evolution because it may offend evangelical Protestants in the course.”<\/p>\n
On January 4, FIRE Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) announced that it had filed a formal complaint with the Higher Learning Commission, Hamline’s accreditor. The professor’s “nonrenewal violates both HLC and Hamline policies clearly committing the university to free expression and its corollary, academic freedom for all faculty,” wrote<\/a> Alex Morey, FIRE’s director of campus rights advocacy, in a letter to the accreditor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n