Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Files Complaint on Behalf of Adjunct Instructor
by Katie Kortepeter
A Hamline University art instructor was removed from her position after sharing two Renaissance depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in class, according to reports.
The professor has not been named in any reports on the incident but was identified as a female in the Pioneer Press.
School administrators condemned the professor in a Nov. 7 campus-wide email, calling her behavior “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic,” according to Hamline’s student newspaper, The Oracle.
Many Muslims today hold that their religion forbids any depiction of its founder, hence the outrage from Aram Wedatalla, president of the school’s Muslim Student Association.
“I’m like, ‘This can’t be real,’” Wedatalla, who was in the professor’s class, told The Oracle. “As a Muslim, and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”
The professor warned students ahead of time and later apologized to Wedatalla, according to The Oracle.
Amid Hamline University’s refusal to correct its decision to fire a professor for showing students a painting of the Islamic prophet Muhammad during an art history course, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a formal complaint with Hamline’s accreditor. The complaint cites the liberal arts university’s failure to abide by a Higher Learning Commission mandate that accredited institutions provide faculty academic freedom.
FIRE’s filing comes as the university continues to defend its widely condemned dismissal of the adjunct art history professor who displayed a medieval painting of the prophet Muhammad during a class discussion of Islamic art. As FIRE pointed out to the university in a Dec. 27 letter, the nonrenewal violates Hamline’s strong academic freedom policy which gives faculty the right to examine “all ideas, some of which will potentially be unpopular and unsettling.”
“Hamline has no right to dismiss an art history instructor for teaching art history,” said FIRE Program Officer Sabrina Conza. “Hamline clearly doesn’t understand what academic freedom means, even though it explicitly promises faculty this core right.”
In December, Hamline announced that its nonrenewal of the professor followed a Muslim student’s complaint about the classroom content, saying “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” (Some Muslims believe images of Muhammad are offensive.)
Several free speech advocacy organizations, including FIRE, PEN America, and the Academic Freedom Alliance urged the university to reinstate the instructor.
FIRE’s Dec. 27 letter reminded the university that academic freedom requires schools to let faculty members — not administrators or students — decide what materials to teach and how to teach them. Although Hamline is a private university not bound by the First Amendment, the administration is required to respect its own binding commitments to academic freedom.
Hamline’s actions also created an impermissible chilling effect among faculty, who may choose to censor their teaching rather than face punishment. This is particularly so for adjunct faculty like this instructor, who do not enjoy the same due process protections as tenured faculty.
FIRE began collecting signatures on a faculty letter of support for the instructor, which has garnered more than 100 signatures from faculty members around the world.
Today’s accreditation complaint asks the Higher Learning Commission to hold Hamline accountable.
“We gave Hamline plenty of time to reverse course, but it’s clear they’re not planning to deliver on their academic freedom promises,” said FIRE attorney Alex Morey, who authored the complaint. “If Hamline won’t listen to free speech advocates or faculty across the country, they’ll have to listen to their accreditor.”
