Last week we ran a letter to the editor by Fayneese Miller, president of Hamline University, disputing the Hamline professor Mark Berkson’s charge in our pages that Hamline’s administration had continued to misrepresent its handling last year of a controversy over an art-history lecture in which an adjunct had shown a medieval image of Muhammad. (The adjunct, Erika López Prater, was not rehired. Subsequently, Hamline’s faculty voted no confidence in Miller, who said she would resign in June 2024.) Miller’s letter contained one blatant inaccuracy, which has since been corrected. Miller wrote: “The AAUP report did not conclude that Hamline had violated anyone’s academic freedom, an inconvenient truth that rarely seems to make its way into commentaries like Professor Berkson’s.” The American Association of University Professors did, in fact, conclude that “the administration of Hamline University violated the academic freedom of Professor Erika López Prater.”
But Miller’s erroneous claim wasn’t simply a mistake. It reflects a theory held by Hamline’s administration, namely, that the AAUP reversed its findings between its initial draft report (which was sent to Hamline for comment) and its final report. Hamline has claimed as much in a response posted to its website when the report was released: “AAUP reversed its key initial finding from its draft report stating it could not prove Hamline violated the academic freedom of the adjunct, without providing additional evidence for that conclusion.” Michael DeCesare, a senior program officer at the AAUP, rejects that interpretation; both versions, he says, conclude that “there was strong circumstantial evidence supporting the claim that the administration violated Professor López Prater’s academic freedom.”
Even if Hamline’s claim were true, it’s not obvious why it should be exculpatory. After all, the final report, not the draft report, is by definition the one that matters. But Hamline’s thinking seems to be that, if the AAUP reversed its conclusion “without providing additional evidence,” then its reasons must have been not evidentiary but political. Hamline’s response to the final report makes the charge explicit: The supposed reversal “clearly calls AAUP’s later objectivity into question and begs the question [sic] as to whether AAUP came to our campus with a predetermined outcome.”
To their credit, Hamline officials acknowledged to The Chronicle that Miller’s initial claim in her letter to the editor was inaccurate, but in doing so they reiterated their insistence that a reversal had occurred between the draft and the final AAUP reports. Here is their statement on the matter: “The American Association of University Professors did assert violation of academic freedom in its final report but does not place Hamline University on its list of institutional offenders. AAUP’s draft report did not make this allegation. Nevertheless, the two concepts should not have been conflated in President Miller’s reply.” (The statement is a little hard to parse, but “this allegation” can only refer to a finding that Hamline violated academic freedom.)
Hamline’s theory does reflect real differences in the language of the two reports. In the draft version, the discussion of López Prater runs thus: “While there is compelling circumstantial evidence suggesting that Hamline’s decision not to offer the spring semester Contemporary Art class that Dr. López Prater had earlier agreed to teach was a consequence of her display of the images and the student complaint about that display, which would be a violation of her academic freedom, this cannot be demonstrated conclusively based on evidence available to the committee.”
And the final version: “Although the committee has not seen facts sufficient to justify a definitive conclusion on this issue, circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that the Hamline administration rescinded the informal offer to assign Professor López Prater another art history course in spring 2023 solely because she had displayed images of the Prophet Muhammad in her October 6 class session, thus violating her academic freedom as a teacher.”
It is in the difference between those two passages, presumably, that Hamline discovers a “reversal.” (I asked the university’s counsel to describe Hamline’s thinking to me, but the counsel declined to respond.) The two versions are semantically equivalent — in both, circumstantial evidence suggests a violation, but there’s no smoking gun (no paper trail, in other words, in which Hamline administrators discuss dropping López Prater for her lesson on Islamic art). But it is true that the first version sounds less confident than the second. That’s because, in the first, the “compelling circumstantial evidence” is mentioned in a concessive clause, while the impossibility of conclusive demonstration appears in the main clause that follows. In the final version, conversely, the lack of facts justifying a definitive conclusion is put into the opening concession, while the main clause that follows (“circumstantial evidence strongly suggests” etc.) emphasizes Hamline’s probable violation of López Prater’s academic freedom.
Apparently seizing on that rhetorical difference, Hamline has tried to insist that the AAUP’s own description of the report — “A new report concludes that the administration of Hamline University violated the academic freedom of Professor Erika López Prater” — applies to the final version but not to the draft version. That can’t be. Both reports conclude that circumstantial evidence suggests that Hamline violated López Prater’s academic freedom.
Nor is López Prater the only faculty member whom the AAUP finds Hamline to have mistreated. The association also had strong words for the university’s unsupportive posture toward Mark Berkson and Michael Reynolds. At a Hamline event, Berkson (as I discussed in January) was prevented by a member of Hamline’s administration from asking a scholarly question of Jaylani Hussein, director of Minnesota’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who had been brought to campus to discuss the López Prater controversy. The Reynolds incident, which also involved Hussein, is apparently less pertinent but more bizarre. Here is the AAUP report’s summary:
The incident involving Dr. Reynolds, a professor of English and former chair of the Faculty Council at Hamline, originated nearly a decade earlier, before Dr. Miller became president and while Professor Reynolds was serving as associate provost. Professor Reynolds had been asked by the administration to don a gorilla suit as part of a fundraising and publicity campaign. While wearing the suit, Professor Reynolds had engaged in various antics designed to encourage donations. The questionable wisdom of such a scheme notwithstanding, it was old news, and no racial inferences had been drawn by the university community at the time. The event survived only in a few photographs on Professor Reynolds’s Facebook page.
However, at a January 30, 2023, press conference convened by CAIR-MN, Mr. Hussein alleged that Professor Reynolds was an anti-Black racist and the leader of a coordinated faculty effort to oust President Miller, also suggesting that racism was widespread among Hamline faculty members. As evidence, Mr. Hussein shared the photographs from Professor Reynolds’s Facebook page, alleging that the behavior they depicted was typical and “still continuing.” In response to the threatening social media discourse the press conference inflamed, the administration asked Professor Reynolds to edit his public profile on the university’s website. At the same time the Saint Paul police increased patrols near his home. Although Professor Reynolds reported Mr. Hussein’s charges to the Hamline administration, the university did not issue any public statement supporting him or explaining the actual context of the photos, nor did it take any steps to disassociate the university from Mr. Hussein and CAIR-MN.
Both the draft and the final versions of the AAUP report contain sentences condemning Hamline for its failure to defend Berkson and Reynolds against Hussein’s aspersions. The draft version concludes that the administration’s actions “significantly worsened the climate for academic freedom at the university,” whereas the final version finds Hamline to have “further chilled the climate for academic freedom at the university.”
If Hamline’s administration hopes to defend itself, it would do better to emphasize the admittedly circumstantial nature of the evidence regarding López Prater than to confect a transformation between the draft and the final version of the report. But a skeptic of Hamline’s administration might feel that Miller’s remarks introducing the “Academic Freedom and Cultural Perspectives” conference, which seemed again and again to refer to the López Prater incident, adds to that circumstantial evidence against Hamline. “There are those who refer to Hamline’s role in organizing this discussion as a defensive move,” Miller begins. In fact, she insists, it is an “offensive one,”
for the goal is to locate the realities of today in a way that recognizes and appreciates the world in which we live, a world that is different from that which existed in 1940 [the year that the AAUP’s statement on academic freedom appeared] and the years beyond. Yes, we stated that we would have a forum addressing academic freedom. However, this forum is not to correct the unsubstantiated comments that swirled around about Hamline, but to challenge each of us to think about how we educate, who we are educating, and for what we are preparing this and the next group of learners to be able to do. This conversation is about how do we ensure that we the educators exercise our academic freedom and still see — see — who is in our classrooms … This is not hysterical rhetoric, as some have claimed … We continue to teach in ways that are more likely to mirror the educational experience that we endured rather than change in ways that bring the diversity of students into the classroom. … Instead of embracing our students we often describe them as unprepared for our institutions. Unprepared in what way? The question becomes, in my mind, Are we prepared enough for them? How do we prepare for them? … [Can we] welcome the many differences that our students now bring to our institutions? …
At Hamline and some of the other Minnesota institutions, our student body is over 10 percent Muslim. This is not the case at some institutions around the nation. And this is not the case at some of our institutions in Minnesota. But it is the case here at Hamline. … So how do we ensure that academic freedom, demographics, and cultural perspectives are not at odds with each other? … I believe it is because we failed to locate the new multicultural programs within a context that was fluent, flexible, connected, and consequently I believe we failed to do the work that we needed to do to make sure that all felt included in our classrooms.
It seems reasonable to suppose that, were Erika López Prater in the audience, she might suspect that at least some of this was about her.
