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Editor’s Note: David M. Perry Journalist, historian andBright Age: A New History of Medieval Europe” He is the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota.follow him twitterThe views expressed herein are those of the author.opinion more opinions on CNN.
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Over ten years ago, I was teaching abortion, eugenics, evolution, crusade, and papacy history at a Catholic college in the Chicago area. If you’ve been bombarded with stories about campus culture’s threats to free speech, you might have thought I was worried. , in Dominica, everyone knew I had my back, from the dean of the department to the president of the university. I always thought that as long as I did it with sincerity and care, I would be fine.
Last fall, Hamline College, a liberal arts college right near where I live in Minnesota, hired art history professor Erika Lopez Prater on a part-time basis to teach a global art history class. I taught
As reported by The New York Times, she warned students, both verbally and on the syllabus, that they would see sensitive images of sacred figures such as the Buddha and the Prophet Muhammad. offered students the opportunity to leave the room without penalty before exhibiting and discussing important images of prophets made for and by Muslims in the 14th century. In other words, she performed with her integrity and care.
students complained. Lopez-Plater shared the student’s complaint with the dean, and they co-wrote an apology to the student. The Times reported that Hamline University’s vice president for inclusive excellence, David Everett, described what happened in a university-wide email as “undeniably disrespectful, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” The school’s president, Phanees S. Miller, said Muslim students “should have replaced academic freedom.”
How should we respond to incidents like this? There’s a temptation, widely seen in the commentary on the events of the past few weeks, to tie it to the ongoing controversy over campus culture. Rather than base our analysis on these details, he recommends focusing on two issues: workers’ rights and the exercise of power.
It’s not that details don’t matter. The story is attributed to art historian Christiane Gruber, who published the painting in question in her New Lines Magazine, one of the leading figures in pre-modern Islamic calligraphy. became even more widely known after I wrote about She called it a “genuine and irreplaceable work of art”, a glorious collection of “corpora of depictions produced mainly in the lands of Persia, Turkey and India between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries” over the centuries. Here is an example.
Islam, like all world religions, is complex and multifaceted, and these depictions are part of its history. It doesn’t mean that you should or should be involved in it for course credit. No one has so far challenged the efforts we’ve taken to allow us to make our own choices (as I argued on CNN in 2014 during another campus culture moral panic).
I have yet to find a scholar of pre-modern Islamic culture who objected to the use of painting in class. Countless Muslims and Non-Muslims scholar upon Social media The essay expresses support for both the pedagogical use of painting and the general use of painting specifically using the approach taken by López Prater. If this story is a sign of “political correctness running amok,” isn’t it strange that all these liberal professors are clearly on the side of the instructors here?
However, caution should be exercised when trying to understand how these Muslim students feel unwelcome on their campuses. , it doesn’t matter if you’ve got the ax to shatter this classroom event or confuse it with broader episodes of Islamophobia and anti-black racism on campus, in the Twin Cities, or anywhere else. Students make mistakes. Sometimes I think young people are focusing too much on the wrong things. Sometimes it turns out I was wrong and they were right. It’s all part of the academic life process.
I don’t know what these students were going through, but academic freedom includes the right to teach controversial material and the right of students to complain about it.
Now back to power and workers’ rights. Students will complain to professors. The classroom is a busy space where, if the teaching is relevant and relevant, we can sometimes encounter things that shake our worldview. The question is how those in power react in such moments.
In this case, Lopez Prater was a part-time, gig worker with no guaranteed future employment. This is, of course, a big problem in academia, which has undergone a generational shift from stable full-time employment to contract work. That’s bad for those of us who work in higher education institutions. Bad for students.
As a full-time professor, I have built the infrastructure to support student learning year after year. Gig workers can’t do that. But it’s good for bosses. It saves them money. And they can dispose of workers when awkward situations arise, such as students complaining about blasphemy.
And if you’re in academia, the reason you’re worried about this story is because commentators on culture cancellation, warning triggers, PC runaways, awakenings, and other buzzwords tell you kids aren’t resilient these days. Not because I’m using it to make you think. Enough to learn. (I promise. Young people who have weathered the pandemic to get an education are resilient enough.) Power dynamics on college campuses are happening everywhere across our economy, and how bosses The thing is no one is safe when it becomes easy to wash off. Their hands instead of getting down in the dirt while the rest of us do their jobs.
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