Taboos in Universities, Against Displaying Certain Images and Quoting Certain Words
The New York Times (Vimal Patel) wrote yesterday about the Hamline University lecturer who was fired for displaying a painting of Muhammed in class. The article identifies the lecturer by name, Erika López Prater, which to my knowledge hadn’t been publicly done until a few days ago. And it adds some other noteworthy items:
The instructor’s actions, [Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations,] said, hurt Muslim students and students of color and had “absolutely no benefit.”
“If this institution wants to value those students,” he added, “it cannot have incidents like this happen. If somebody wants to teach some controversial stuff about Islam, go teach it at the local library.” …
Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.
Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.
This vividly illustrates, I think, some of the points that Randy Kennedy and I wrote about in The New Taboo: Quoting Epithets in the Classroom and Beyond with regard to similar demands for expurgating items (there, quoted epithets) from class discussions of source materials, such as court opinions, court records, historical documents, musical works, and so on. And it reinforces our view (see especially pp. 56-57 of that article) that, if universities adopt a norm that professors should expurgate epithets from the sources they’re discussing, it will be h
Article from Reason.com
