I could belabor this case, but I’ll refrain. This New York Times article tells you what you need to know. A summary:

Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.

In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.

In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.

Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.

We’ve had some disagreements on this blog about the nature and scope of “cancel culture”–what it is, whether it’s justified, who is to blame, etc. But we can abstract from those disagreements for present purposes. This is an easy case. An instructor exercises academic freedom in an academically uncontroversial, pedagogically responsible way. A small group of religious dogmatists, weaponizing their particular brand of ethno-religious tribalism, claims to be “offended” in the name of Islam, and demands the instructor’s ouster from the university. The university, pandering to these students’ fashionable temper tantrums, and taking advantage of the instructor’s adjunct status, violates the norms of academic freedom and fires her. It’s a clear, paradigmatic, textbook case of what should never happen, but often does. It demands push back.

From New Lines Magazine: “This painting is one of the images at the center of the discussion in the Hamline classroom. It is included in a historical text written by Rashid al-Din, a famous 14th-century Muslim vizier and historian. (Edinburgh University Library, Or. Ms. 20)”

There are many ways of pushing back, but for now, I’ll recommend the simplest and most straightforward. The Times article mentions a change.org petition organized by Christiane Gruber, a well-regarded historian of Islamic art, on behalf of “an international group of scholars and students, Muslim and non-Muslim, specializing in Islamic History, Islamic Studies, History of Art, Islamic Art History, and allied fields in the arts and humanities.” The petition is prefaced by an eloquent and informative statement, which I assume was written by (or primarily written by) Gruber. I signed the petition about an hour ago, when the total number of signatures was around 4,900. I highly encourage readers of this blog to sign it. The petitioners’ original goal was to reach 5,000 signatures. I suspect that that’s been reached by now, but there’s no harm in exceeding it.

Gruber also has a longer form essay on the controversy in New Lines Magazine, which I highly recommend, with useful background, and a series of irrefutably commonsensical arguments against Hamline and in defense of López Prater.  I’m copying an image of the contested painting into this post, but if for copyright reasons I have to remove it, you can find it (as well as the quoted caption) in Gruber’s New Lines essay.

It’s a sad truth that many of the people with the unchecked power to remove faculty from our universities, whether students or administrators, are themselves the ones who have no place there. I’m thinking specifically of opportunist mediocrities like Fayneese Miller, the university’s president, and ignorant dogmatists like members of the university’s Muslim Students Association, who demanded (and got) Dr. López Prater’s ouster. Either we support competent pedagogy and scholarship against assaults like theirs, or we’ll lose something priceless to the moral and epistemic hacks of the world. That loss might not register on people who lack the intellectual autonomy to make much use of it, but would deal a significant blow to the rest of us. If a jihad is required to avert that eventuality, we should be willing to wage it, and make that willingness clear to the other side as well.