What does academic freedom mean today?
A meditation on the Hamline University debacle
When I first read that Hamline University had fired an adjunct professor of art history for showing a medieval painting featuring the prophet Mohammad, I expected that she would sue. In the interval it took for Dr. Erika López Prater and her attorneys to file their case, Hamline administrators initially doubled down on their claim that López Prater’s behavior was “undeniably Islamophobic,” despite a public announcement by the Council on American-Islamic Relations defending the embattled professor. After considerable blowback, university leaders bizarrely tried to claim that firing López Prater was not connected with the flap over her course, even though their own press releases said otherwise. Then, late last week, Hamline apparently decided to cut its losses by admitting its mistake, though there will assuredly be more pain to come for the university after its settlement with López Prater or after her certain triumph in court.
Most of what needs to be said about academic freedom in this case is captured in a statement by art history faculty at the University of Minnesota, where López Prater completed her Ph.D. The following applies to most academic content in the arts and humanities:
“As educators, we are challenged to make past worlds alive and relevant to contemporary viewers, which we do through the conveyance of artworks, even when it means presenting cultural realities that are distinct from or even anathema to our own. Indeed, we study artworks from the past precisely because they were understood in their own time very unlike how viewers might apprehend them now. This is what makes them indispensable records of individual, cultural, and historical difference.”
I have followed this case with interest because I have stood on both sides of the academic freedom debate: first as a conservative student and later as a professor at a private liberal arts college. Everyone likes a parable of right and wrong, and the binaries at Hamline are satisfyingly stark. But what continues to trouble me about the case is how much it reveals about our censorious time. Book bans, curriculum policing, and professor firings get the headlines, but what about the hidden decisions of many professors to steer clear of troubled waters by quietly cutting texts or images from their syllabi? The visible threats to academic freedom are aggravating enough, but the invisible avoidance of those threats, and the consequent impoverishment of education, haunts me more.
In the rest of this essay I explain how I enjoyed more academic freedom at a Presbyterian college in the early 1990s than many students and faculty now do, even at secular institutions.