It’s been less than a week since a group of anti-Israel activists on the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus packed up their tents and provisions and ended their encampment protest on Northrop Mall.
And now come the questions: How much was the damage incurred by the boycott/divestment/sanctions protesters? Who will pay for it?
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A federal judge refused to dismiss religious discrimination claims against a private university that dumped an art history professor after she showed her class “Islamophobic” depictions of the Prophet Muhammad commissioned by Muslims, saying the “novelty” of Erika Lopez Prater’s argument didn’t make it implausible.
The order Friday by U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez means ongoing scrutiny of Hamline University, whose President Fayneese Miller announced her scheduled retirement two months after an overwhelming vote of no-confidence from faculty in the wake of Prater’s non-renewal.
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Hamline University President Fayneese Miller announced on Monday that she will retire months after she walked back an administrator’s claim that a professor’s lecture was “Islamophobic” for showing an unveiled portrait of the prophet Muhammad.
Miller will officially step down on June 30, 2024, according to the announcement sent to the Daily Caller News Foundation. Faculty members demanded she resign following a controversy that involved Professor Erika López Prater’s contract not being renewed for the spring semester after a student complained that she showed an unveiled portrait of the prophet Muhammad during a lecture on Islamic art.
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Two liberal arts schools six minutes from each other in St. Paul, Minn., have explicitly subordinated Islam-related academic and artistic freedom to the feelings of Muslim students in recent months, alarming faculty both nationwide and closer to home.
Macalester College temporarily shut down and then added curtains to an art exhibit depicting partially exposed figures in hijabs and niqabs “to prevent unintentional or non-consensual viewing” after Muslim students complained, the administration said in an email Feb. 6 excerpted by Minnesota immigrant news nonprofit Sahan Journal.
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A free speech watchdog group Thursday morning named several prominent colleges and universities to its list of the top ten worst colleges in the country for freedom of speech based on specific times the institutions reportedly violated students’ and faculties’ rights.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) named Hamline University, Collin College, Emerson University, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Loyola University New Orleans (NOLA), Texas A&M, Pennsylvania State University, Emporia State University, Tennessee Tech University and the University of Oregon as the worst institutions for free speech in its 12th annual report, shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. The report detailed the worst cases of censorship the watchdog faced at higher education institutions in 2022.
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A small liberal arts college with social-justice roots. A community member accused of career-ending discrimination against a minority. And an administration that repeatedly trumpets those accusations, which were made by student activists and hinged on an extreme interpretation of a largely undisputed factual record. Those circumstances cost Ohio’s Oberlin College over $36 million in damages, interest and legal fees last year in a defamation lawsuit brought by a family-owned bakery accused of racial profiling for tackling a black student shoplifter.
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Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., is standing by its decision to punish an art instructor who shared two Renaissance depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in class.
Reports of the instructor’s removal generated outrage among free-speech advocates, who called the school’s actions “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.”
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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.
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Hamline University announced that they will be requiring students to be vaccinated against COVID before classes commence in the fall. The University’s President Fayneese Miller said, “We want, and need, to be together as a community. We value a sense of community at Hamline and all that entails, but to return to what we value and who we are, mandating a COVID-19 vaccine is necessary.” The announcement was made on Thursday with the expectation that students will be fully vaccinated before returning to campus in August.
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Hamline University, along with Sankore Consulting, is hosting an online Equity Education Edcamp this summer for the Northeast Metro School District 916.
The event, titled Minnesota Educational Equity Edcamp, is to equip teachers to better help families and students of color. The session is called “Decolonizing Forgiveness: Moving from Apologies to Accountability.”
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A Minnesota university is offering a social justice degree with courses ranging from “Gender Politics” to “Diversity and Education.”
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