I said this line once a week for at least 15 years, I think.
Was the bag really that big back then? This looks old enough that people smoked on airlines.
- Smoking was banned on flights in 1990.
Flying when you could smoke on a plane was hellish, even if you were a smoker. It’s hard to imagine today how awful it was to be trapped in a metal tube with people puffing on coffin nails.
Back in 2000-ish I got lucky and was picked for a trip to China to work a deal, it was amusing to see normal flights for the first three legs through Narita in Japan, and then the last leg everybody lit up.
nope
I can’t believe M3GAN has a 94% rotten tomato score. Can’t wait to check it out.
I don’t know where else to put this. Might merit it’s own thread, depending on the discussions it results in.
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.
Officials at Hamline, a small, private university in St. Paul, Minn., with about 1,800 undergraduates, had tried to douse what they feared would become a runaway fire. Instead they ended up with what they had tried to avoid: a national controversy, which pitted advocates of academic liberty and free speech against Muslims who believe that showing the image of Prophet Muhammad is always sacrilegious.
After Dr. López Prater showed the image, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action.
Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.
Article continues…
Ken White wrote a Substack about this event. He pretty much says everything I would say about it. Obviously it’s bullshit that she lost her job. Might work in the cancel culture thread. I actually agree; here is a true cancel culture occurrence by the censorious left.
I know this sounds… incredibly small minded or petty, but these (kinds/classes) of incidents always seem to happen in tiny regional universities i’ve literally never heard of before. I think the issue is that these little universities simply don’t want to rock the boat, because they don’t have the resources to deal with boat-rocking.
There’s also, imo, probably something about the culture of universities - and this is conjecture on my part, but i don’t participate in academia - shifting from tenured (or tenure track) professors to adjunct professors, many of whom are treated effectively as post-grad+ positions, disposable and nearly-temp, and to whom the University feels significantly less loyalty to. IE, this same event, except it’s a tenured, 20 year veteran department head, vs a ‘temp-to-hire’ adjunct professor.
Adjuncts are supposed to keep their heads down, noses clean, be unseen, and collect their small paycheck, then disappear from campus once their classes are taught. They’re (often, as i understand it) not considered faculty, aren’t given faculty privileges, kept out of faculty meetings and facilities, ect.
Some of the recollections of the students involved do not seem to align with what happened, if the article’s reporting is correct
In a December interview with the school newspaper, the student who complained to the administration, Aram Wedatalla, described being blindsided by the image.
“I’m like, ‘This can’t be real,’” said Ms. Wedatalla, who in a public forum described herself as Sudanese. “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.”
But the professor apparently gave students multiple warnings that this was going to happen, and showing the painting wasn’t intended to insult Muslims.
I should say offending Islamic sensibilities is kind of a different class of issue than simply Cancel Culture. The Fatwa was finally taken advantage of by a crazy against Salmon Rushdie. There’s absolutely no doubt that, however people want or don’t want to admit it, there is an element of culture terrorism in dealing with this stuff. That people who, let’s say, align with the CC goals (without using that language) can act and be culturally sensitive at the same time as avoiding a knife to the eye, is kind of a confluence of advantages.
Honestly if the professor had wanted to do it, they actually went about the completely wrong way - just don’t tell anyone, show the art, then if they get called out, say “oh, i’m sorry” and then shuffle it off the table. By making it a Big Deal, she kind of primed her class to treat it as a Big Deal.
Well, she respected her students. She tried to avoid offending anyone, and made the mistake of treating them as rational adults, rather than people looking to be offended so they could wield that supposed offense as a cudgel.
Agreeing to disagree is something that has been left behind in the 20th Century, for all the lamenting the (we) Olds generation may do. This is probably itself a function of a dysfunctional political system unable to affect barely the slightest cultural, economic, or political change, imo (and so for young people culture is politics and consumption is culture), but that’s a longer topic.
I think that 1) this event is minor and not emblematic of a cultural tendency. 2) I mean, non-white non-men might disagree that the 19th and early 20th centuries were a period characterized by civil disagreement.
Agree, +1 like x2
I agree with @Matt_W Matt_W’s take that this is an example of that rare but real item: a legit liberal cancel culture incident.
I mean if you are going to take that line, then respect for Conservative Christian students or Fundamentalist Muslim students on things like depicting gay marriage or transgender identity in class would also require superseding academic freedom.
I’m sorry. Religion is not a trump card to legitimate discourse or legitimate academic discussion.
I don’t support depicting the prophet Mohammed just b/c we can legally do so here in the US, nor do I support doing it just to “show our freedoms” but at the same time we cannot allow religious strictures to limit legitimate classroom topics.
I think the way the professor approached this was reasonable and the admin reaction was excessive and unreasonable. A student can be offended in class. It’s going to happen. I recall as an undergrad in the late 80s we had a visiting professor from Germany with a very atheist POV teaching the history of early Christianity and the Campus Crusade for Christ folks were quite offended by her but her teaching was all rock solid academically. She actually taught me a lot about interpreting original sources and taking context into account.
Of course, for every legit example of cancel culture there’s IMO 100 exploited and exaggerated examples but we’ve already had that thread…
But still, yeah, this one is legit. The college looks like a bunch of asses.
While I’m riffing on that History Prof from Germany, I’ll share this anecdote. I was at Berkeley undergrad and this was an upper division History course and we students thought we were hot shit. And she gives us a writing assignment about the Donation of Constantine without telling us it was a forgery. And none of us had good enough high school history backgrounds to know it was a forgery. She was absolutely shocked by the papers and we students looked like fools. She said German uni students would have the background and yet we supposedly hot shit Berkeley students did not.
However, I did learn a very useful thing, useful to this day in my practice of law. When I was writing the paper, I kept thinking to myself: “self, this Donation thing just doesn’t make any sense. It just seems out of context to what I know about the late Roman Empire and the early Christian Church.” And yet I ignored my instincts and “trusted the primary source” only to be oh so wrong. I learned that primary sources can lie like rugs, and that context really does matter, and also to trust my instincts.
Anyhow, this all relates to this discussion b/c when she revealed the forgery in discussing how nobody got an A on the papers, the Campus Crusade folks were deeply offended, like rabidly so. But you know, it was a hell of a teaching moment.
Amen.
To take it a step further should everyone wear hijabs so that someone from Iran isn’t offended?
Of course not. If you even suggested it, you’d be laughed off the campus.
But this isn’t much different at the end of the day.
It’s akin to a blasphemy law.
I do think there are contexts in which relying on US freedom of speech laws to depict Mohammed IS Islamophobic in context. But this is not that context IMO.