Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    A Culture of Cybersecurity
    Opportunities in the Hard Sciences
    Career Preparation
Sign In
Newsletter Icon

The Review

Understand the big ideas and provocative arguments shaping the academy. Delivered on Mondays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, sign up to receive it in your email inbox.

January 3, 2023
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email

From: Len Gutkin

Subject: 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 the 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.”

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

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 any event, as Gruber explains, the historical fact is that Islamic prohibitions on depictions of Muhammad have been highly variable, and there are sharp disagreements between clerics over whether an absolute ban exists. As the former Iranian cleric Hassan Yousefi Eshkavari told the BBC back in 2015: “From a religious point of view there is no prohibition on these pictures. These images exist in shops as well as houses. They aren’t seen as insulting, either from a religious or cultural viewpoint.”

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. As Gruber told me, “based on the fact that the only fatwa prohibiting images of Muhammad in Islam was issued by a Salafi cleric in Saudi Arabia in 2013, then it’s clear that Hamline has taken a latter-day, ultraconservative stance on the matter.” And as Amna Khalid puts it in our pages, by assuming that this ultraconservative stance is universally shared by Muslims, Hamline’s administrators “have flattened the rich history and diversity of Islamic thought.” Hamline’s caricatural view of Muslim thought and history, with its corollary assumption that Muslim students are uniquely in need of protection against the rational procedures of scholarship, is itself ironically Islamophobic, or at least orientalist.

The Hamline controversy has already garnered widespread condemnation — PEN America and FIRE have issued statements, Jonathan Zimmerman wrote an op-ed in the Daily News, and a petition calling for an investigation of the professor’s dismissal is circulating — so it seems reasonable to hope that the administration will realize its misstep and reverse course. But even if it does, the incident will remain revealing for how it exposes the quasi-religious element in the stern interdictions imposed on various kinds of words and images in academic life now.

Religion, for Émile Durkheim and others in his tradition, involves the division of things into segregated zones of the sacred and the profane. At Hamline, student activists and their allies in the administration have appointed themselves defenders of the sacred. More commonly, such groups pursue the condemnation of the profane. A recent, comical example: As Michael Powell reports in The New York Times, Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society has decided that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope must never be named — instead, it asks “authors submitting scientific papers to its journals to use the JWST acronym rather than the full name of the observatory. In this case, the previous requirement for the acronym to be spelled out at first mention will not be observed.”

The reason? James Webb, who was NASA’s chief administrator leading up to the moon landing, had long been rumored to have participated in homophobic purges of various government agencies. Actually, as Powell reports, the evidence against Webb is largely mistaken, something the physicist Hakeem Oluseyi explained in a 2021 article called “Was NASA’s Historic Leader James Webb a Bigot?” (The answer: no.) Some challenged Oluseyi’s claims — and at least one person, Powell writes, went so far as to send anonymous text messages to Powell defaming Oluseyi.

Powell’s reporting, it seems to me, has decisively resolved the dispute in favor of Oluseyi. But the larger meaning of this incident is suggested not by the Twitter-driven hostility between warring academic factions — an old story — but by the Royal Astronomical Society’s prohibition on printing the very name “James Webb,” a bizarrely superstitious concession to word-magic for an organization of scientists. At least Hamline’s activists have behind them the authority of a clerical and jurisprudential tradition with deep roots! The scientists are just plucking new rules out of thin air, arbitrarily designating a new he-who-shall-not-be-named.

In other respects the situations are totally different. Suppressing Webb’s name in scientific publications is farcical, but it won’t impede the basic activity of science. Caving in to far-right theocratic orthodoxy would make it impossible to teach anything other than a bowdlerized version of Islamic art history. It also aligns the university, and not all that distantly, with rather more violent enforcers of the putative prohibition on the representation of Muhammad. That is tragic.

Read Christiane Gruber on the Hamline incident here, Hakeem Oluseyi on James Webb here, and Michael Powell on the controversy over Oluseyi’s work on Webb here. And for more on the question of bans on the image of Muhammad, check out Gruber’s article here. And don’t miss Amna Khalid’s “Most of All, I Am Offended as a Muslim,” here.

Discord Among the Psychologists: An Update.

Last month I wrote about a dispute between Klaus Fiedler, the (now former) editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, and the Stanford psychologist Steven O. Roberts. The very short version: Roberts and several co-authors wrote an article alleging that psychological research suffered from racial bias; Fiedler organized a series of critical responses to that essay, including one by Bernhard Hommel; when Roberts drafted a response to his critics, Fiedler shared the draft with Hommel, whom he considered a “quality consultant.” Roberts, objecting to this and other aspects of Fiedler’s handling of the critiques, published his response on PsyArXiv, complete with a scathing preamble accusing Fiedler of editorial misconduct. (There’s much more to the story — for a more detailed account, check out Tom Bartlett’s coverage.)

Within days of a petition’s call for Fiedler’s firing, the board of the Association for Psychological Science, which publishes Perspectives, forced him to resign. My own sense that Fiedler had been denied any semblance of due process, and that the board had left itself open to charges of cowardice in the face of a moral panic, appears to be shared by the journal’s associate editors — all but one of whom, as Lee Jussim reports on his blog, have resigned. (You can confirm this by comparing the journal’s current website with an archived version from before the contretemps. Of the former associate editors, two told me that they had resigned in response to the controversy; a third said that she had resigned in order to leave a clean slate for the next chief editor.) As the Brown psychologist Joachim Krueger explained in a letter announcing his resignation from Perspectives’ editorial board, the association “has placed ideological mandates before science, and has thereby begun to throttle it. I do not know how you might recover from this. The public may come to see you as a gang of garden gnomes with axes to grind, axes too heavy for you to lift.”

Of course, some in the profession disagree. Linda J. Skitka, an emerita professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested on Twitter that the board’s “prompt action” had been justified; my own coverage of the incident, she said, “misses/glosses over a huge part of what led the board to ask for Fiedler’s resignation: His highly irregular editorial conduct.” Moreover, “asking Hommel to serve as an ‘informant’ (let’s be real: it was as a reviewer) on Stevens [sic] reply was super weird and inappropriate.” Skitka may have been skimming, since in fact I wrote this: “Fiedler’s handling of the editorial process was high-handed and arrogant, and his giving Hommel something like review capacity over Roberts’s response was odd and potentially culpable.” In any event, until the association’s board submits its process to some kind of outside review, no impartial observer could consider Fiedler’s forced resignation kosher.

A 2022 Review Round-Up

It’s a new year — ring it in the right way by catching up on 12 of my favorite Review essays from 2022:

My Cartoonish Cancellation, by Phoebe Gloeckner
The Cruelty of Faculty Churn, by James Rushing Daniel
Academic Freedom Has Always Been Dirty, by Joan W. Scott
Colleges Must Stop Trying to Appease the Right, by Silke-Maria Weineck
How Affirmative Action Was Derailed by Diversity, by Richard Thompson Ford
When Did Racism Begin? by Vanita Seth
Our Students Don’t Need Identitarian Paternalism, by Blake Smith
When Students Harass Professors, by Alicia Andrzejewski
I Was a Diversity Hire — Then They Unhired Me, by Sheila Sundar
The Philosopher Queens, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman
Why Are Scholars Such Snitches? by Laura Kipnis
We Need a Less Moralistic Humanities, by Nicolas Langlitz

And, from outside The Chronicle, a baker’s dozen of essays and interviews from my weekly recommendations that have stayed with me:

The Metaphysician-in-Chief, by Jared Marcel Pollen (Liberties)
When Reason Fails, by Sam Kriss (The Point)
The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat, by Helen Lewis (The Atlantic)
Lucky Guy, by Joshua Cohen (The New York Review of Books)
The Shocks and Aftershocks of “The Waste Land,” by Anthony Lane (The New Yorker)
“I Want to Be the Baby,” by Kasia Boddy (London Review of Books)
The World as a Game, by Justin E.H. Smith (Liberties)
I, the People, by Lynn Hunt (The New York Review of Books)
Gross Clinic, by Amy Taubin (Artforum)
False Witnesses, by Phil Klay (The Point)
The Forgotten Movement to Reclaim Africa’s Stolen Art, by Julian Lucas (The New Yorker)
Invasion of the Fact-Checkers, by Jacob Siegel (Tablet)
Sandbagging in Odessa, by Elena Kostyuchenko (n+1)

The Latest

BooksForum2022 collage.jpg
The Review | Forum
The Best Scholarly Books of 2022
December 21, 2022
Thinkers including Hal Foster, Anthony Grafton, Martha Jones, and Anahid Nersessian pick their favorites.
photo illustration of black and white faces with ladders and red geometric shapes
The Review | Opinion
Higher Ed’s Approach to Diversity Is Broken
By Evelyn Alsultany December 15, 2022
We need more than vague inclusivity.
university campus made of rubik's cube
The Review | Opinion
Universities Can’t Do Everything
By Barbara R. Snyder, Holden Thorp December 15, 2022
They’re pulled in many directions. A refocus on teaching is in order.
flames on white background
The Review | Opinion
FIRE Is Wrong About FIRE
By Jeffrey Sachs December 14, 2022
Too often, the organization misses the forest for the trees.
illustration of a man walking down a dark dead end alleyway
The Review | Readers React
‘Higher Ed Is a Scam of a Career’: Readers Speak Out on Dead-End Jobs
December 14, 2022
In academe, advancement opportunities can be few and far between.
corinthian column with mortarboard
The Review | Essay
Citadels of Neoliberalism or Bastions of Wokism?
By David A. Bell December 9, 2022
What elite higher ed’s critics on both the left and the right get wrong.
Illustration showing an all-seeing "Big Brother" eye spying into a classroom.
The Review | Opinion
Do Professors Have a Right to Mistreat Students?
By Andrew Koppelman December 9, 2022
Conservative courts are establishing a dangerous new precedent to discriminate and abuse.

Recommended

  • “Artists who couldn’t paint their way out of a paper bag are being exhibited cheek by jowl with refined stylists whose images evince a profound engagement with contemporary reality.” In The Nation, Barry Schwabsky on what’s good and what’s bad in the vogue for figurative painting.
  • For his podcast “Close Readings,” Kamran Javadizadeh talks with Langdon Hammer about James Merrill’s poem “Christmas Tree.”
  • “Tattoos traditionally enacted a range of cultural work both through the chosen iconography and the act of tattooing, which took ritualized form in both religious and secular ceremonies.” In Lapham’s Quarterly, Mairin Odle on what European painters made of Native American tattoos.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Harvard University
'Deeply Unsettling'
Harvard’s Battle With Trump Escalates as Research Money Is Suddenly Canceled
Photo-based illustration of a hand and a magnifying glass focusing on a scene from Western Carolina Universiy
Equal Opportunity
The Trump Administration Widens Its Scrutiny of Colleges, With Help From the Internet
Santa J. Ono, president of the University of Michigan, watches a basketball game on the campus in November 2022.
'He Is a Chameleon'
At U. of Michigan, Frustrations Grew Over a President Who Couldn’t Be Pinned Down
Photo-based illustration of University of Michigan's president Jeremy Santa Ono emerging from a red shape of Florida
Leadership
A Major College-President Transition Is Defined by an About-Face on DEI

From The Review

Illustration showing a valedictorian speaker who's tassel is a vintage microphone
The Review | Opinion
A Graduation Speaker Gets Canceled
By Corey Robin
Illustration showing a stack of coins and a university building falling over
The Review | Opinion
Here’s What Congress’s Endowment-Tax Plan Might Cost Your College
By Phillip Levine
Photo-based illustration of a college building under an upside down baby crib
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Must Stop Infantilizing Everyone
By Gregory Conti

Upcoming Events

Ascendium_06-10-25_Plain.png
Views on College and Alternative Pathways
Coursera_06-17-25_Plain.png
AI and Microcredentials
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin