In November, an adjunct art history instructor was fired from as having stated beforehand. “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 images were prefaced in the lecture with a two-minute introduction and content warning—and had been mentioned, as well, in the course syllabus. In her apology email to the offended student, the instructor recalled giving religious students “an ‘out’” by offering time to shut off the video component of the online lecture—after which, she claims to have “described every subsequent slide… with language to indicate when I was no longer showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad.”
Nonetheless, on Nov. 11, the AVPIE told The Oracle that Hamline’s administration “decided it was best” that the instructor “was no longer part of the Hamline community.”
Berkson informed The Daily Beast that, throughout the whole affair (from the time the AVPIE referred to the lecture as “undeniably… Islamophobic” to The Oracle interview confirming that the professor had been let go), there had been “no communication whatsoever” with the instructor.
Hamline University has not responded to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Free expression advocacy organizations FIRE and PEN America have issued statements referring to the dismissal, respectively, as “not acceptable at a university that commits to academic freedom” and potentially “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.”
Both organizations called for the instructor’s reinstatement, and, on Dec. 24, Gruber posted a petition online urging Hamline’s Board of Trustees to conduct “an independent, outside investigation into this series of events…” Still, the damage has already been done, as such an event inevitably creates a chilling effect on the academic freedom of all instructors who cover topics that could offend students’ religious beliefs.
It may be tempting to point fingers at Hamline students in this instance. Certainly, there have been missteps on their part (of which the student newspaper’s censorship of the only alternative perspective to that of the administration, at the time, is perhaps the most egregious example).
However, as Berkson made plain to The Daily Beast, “I don’t think that the blame should be placed on the students or the faculty member. I just think the administration should have handled this better.” For one, the incident “did not occur in a vacuum,” as the offended Muslim students have experienced real Islamophobia in their lives.
On top of that, Berkson emphasized that students with religious backgrounds who have not academically studied religion may be unaware of “all the theology, the art, the law” within their own tradition. Before it spiraled out of control, then, the controversy could have offered an opportunity to educate—if, for instance, it had led to a productive dialogue with “scholarly voices” present, facilitated by Hamline.
Instead, the administration took an unfortunate and escalatory direction. So, rather than overfocusing on the students’ conduct, perhaps scrutiny should be primarily directed toward Hamline’s administration, as well as broader trends in higher education that created the conditions for such an incident.
After all, this fiasco unfolded within an industry that has seen the evaporation of tenure-track jobs and a vast shift toward casualization—all while tuition costs balloon, in no small part to accommodate schools’ ever-growing administrative bureaucracies.
The fired art teacher belonged to what has become a precarious majority in academia: adjunct instructors, employed on contingent contracts that can be terminated at the whims of their employers. Opposite this growing cohort has emerged increasingly top-down administrative apparatuses that too often consist of officials distant from the classroom, who nevertheless enjoy great (unilateral, in this case) authority over it.
The instructor’s adjunct status afforded Hamline’s administration the ability to infringe on her freedom to teach, and unilaterally deny her due process amid an unceremonious dismissal—a testament to the fact that academic freedom and academics’ job security are inextricably linked. Adjuncts’ disposability hinders their freedom to bring up controversial subjects in their classrooms.
The Hamline affair will inevitably prick the ears of all sorts of reactionaries, including true Islamophobes. Contrary to what you may hear from these alarmists, what happened at Hamline does not represent sharia law coming to American universities.
This sort of story—in which administrators, illiterate in the relevant scholarship, can smear and terminate an adjunct, and betray their institution’s professed commitment to academic freedom—is simply one to be expected out of our deeply casualized academy.
