The Review: Fired for Teaching Art History

"When, a couple of months ago, I likened the University of Michigan students who persecuted Phoebe Gloeckner for teaching comix they considered offensive to the 16th-century Calvinist iconoclasts who destroyed sacred paintings, I was risking hyperbole. Or at least so I thought. But a recent incident at Hamline University, in Minnesota, literalizes the analogy. In this case, the offending image, shown by a non-tenure-track instructor in a survey course on art history, dates from the Middle Ages and depicts, in the words of the University of Michigan art historian Christiane Gruber, the Prophet Muhammad “receiving his first Quranic revelation through the Angel Gabriel.” Invoking a putative conservative Islamic ban on representations of Muhammad, some Muslim students asserted that showing the image was Islamophobic; the university’s administration agreed (“respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom,” Hamline’s president wrote); the instructor’s contract was not renewed. Religious orthodoxy and sensitivities about diversity converged uncannily in the condemnatory language of David Everett, Hamline’s associate vice president for inclusive excellence. Showing the image, Everett said, was “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful, and Islamophobic.”

Gruber, who broke the story in New Lines Magazine, observes that Hamline’s administrators have inhibited, at a fundamental level, the ability of art-history professors to do their jobs: “An instructor who showed an Islamic painting during a visual analysis — a basic exercise for art-history training — was publicly impugned for hate speech and dismissed thereafter, without access to due process.” Just as Gloeckner, who had been hired for her expertise in underground comix, discovered that her subject had become unteachable, anyone teaching global art-history survey courses will now think long and hard about including material from the Muslim world.

Imagine if a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose version of Christianity is strictly aniconic, protested against being asked to analyze Botticelli’s “Madonna and Child” in a class on European art because they considered the painting rank Mariolatry — and if administrators, under the sign of diversity, fired the teacher. To teach premodern art history is almost always also to teach the history of religion; Hamline has rendered both impossible....

In siding with the offended students, Hamline’s diversity administrators have not only trampled academic freedom; they have cluelessly taken sides in a theological debate about which they know nothing and over which they have no authority. In doing so, they have unwittingly affirmed a specific and highly reactionary position...."