The Review

As Artnet reported last week, Hamline University, in St. Paul, Minn., has settled with former adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater, whose contract was not renewed after devout Muslim students complained about her showing an Islamic medieval devotional painting of the prophet Muhammad in October 2022. (For many Muslims, viewing images of Muhammad is forbidden.) Although the dollar amount is private, the settlement represents a defeat for Hamline, which evidently lacked confidence that it could prevail in court against Prater’s claim that she had been religiously discriminated against. As the judge who allowed the case to go forward wrote, Prater made a plausible case that Hamline’s actions against her were “because she was not Muslim or did not conform to the religious beliefs held by some that viewing images of the Prophet Muhammad is forbidden.”

Prater wasn’t the only professor in 2022 to get into trouble over showing religious imagery of Muhammad. As our Emma Pettit reported, Maziar Behrooz, an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University, faced a formal investigation after a devout student complained about a drawing of the prophet that Behrooz had displayed during a course on Islamic civilization. “I was not prepared,” Behrooz said, “for somebody to be offended, in a secular university, talking about history rather than religion.”

Behrooz was ultimately cleared. But should he ever have been investigated in the first place? An article by Bob Egelko from earlier this year in the San Francisco Chronicle sheds some light on how that investigation came about — and evokes some of the major fault lines within the administration.

In 2021, Egelko reports, Heather Borlase was hired as SFSU’s civil-rights administrator, then fired the following year. She’s now suing the university. According to Borlase and her lawyers, she was fired for doing her job. University leaders, Borlase’s lawyers say, were “more interested in cover-up and hiding the problem of their failure and refusal to address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation complaints because of the negative press.”

Among other instances in which she says she was encouraged to cover up discrimination, Borlase names the Behrooz case. When her office decided to look into whether Behrooz had “provocatively and gratuitously displayed a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad to students in his Islamic history class without warning,” Borlase says, she was explicitly discouraged by SFSU’s president. As Egelko summarizes the suit’s claims, “University President Lynn Mahoney had pressured Borlase not to investigate, criticized her for doing so, and sent an email to the campus community saying the investigation interfered with academic freedom.” According to Borlase’s lawyers, she was fired “for her efforts to comply with — and ensure San Francisco State University complied with — the university’s duties” when it came to the Behrooz case.

The broad lineaments of this conflict are familiar by now. There are echoes, for example, of the showdown between Jenny Martinez, at the time dean of Stanford Law School, and Tirien Steinbach, at the time Stanford Law’s diversity dean, over Steinbach’s failure to quell — even her apparent encouragement of — student heckling of a conservative judge who had been invited to speak. In the face of Steinbach’s actions, Martinez scolded Steinbach (who no longer works at Stanford) and issued a major statement on academic freedom. While the details are different, both Mahoney’s quarrel with Borlase and Martinez’s with Steinbach are symptomatic of the last few years, in which competing factions of administrators battle it out over whether student sensitivity or academic freedom will prevail.

Recommended

• “The average kidney stone is more like Montaigne’s than Cromwell’s — a personal trouble rather than a historical turning-point.” In Liberties, Matthew Zipf writes about biography, history, and the critic and novelist Renata Adler.
• “Any bookish person can sympathize with the tyranny of leisure, and few things are more disappointing to the new convert than religious laxity.” In The New York Review of Books, Meghan O’Gieblyn reviews Catherin Coldstream’s memoir Cloistered: My Years as a Nun.
• “There is, in other words, something vertiginously postmodern about what Hinckley called his ‘historical deed’ and the madness in which it was cultivated.” In The New York Times Magazine, Mark O’Connell talks to John Hinckley Jr., Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin.

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

Yours,

Len Gutkin