An American university has come under fire from critics after firing a professor this winter for showing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad in class. Several associations denounce an attack on academic freedom.
Hamline University, located in northern Minnesota, “admits not renewing an art history professor’s contract last semester after a student complained that he is Muslim,” civil rights group FIRE said in a complaint filed Jan. 4 with an American University Council was submitted.
In fact, the student saw it as an attack on her religious beliefs that her teacher offered “an optional 14th-century painting in class.”
Islam, in its strict interpretation, forbids any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.
Such a dismissal is “a clear violation” of the university’s rules, which “oblige it to guarantee freedom of expression and the resulting academic freedom,” the FIRE association added.
Erika Lopez Prater, an interim professor who also showed another image of the Prophet during her online course in October, had previously issued numerous warnings to her students, urging them to leave the session if they wanted to, multiple American media outlets reported .
The teacher accused of Islamophobia by the university later apologized. Vain.
“Respect for students who follow the Muslim faith in this class should have trumped academic freedom,” Hamline University president Fayneese Miller said in an email quoted by the New York Times.
“If an art history professor cannot show students a vital work of art for fear that offended students or groups might fire it, then there is no guarantee of academic freedom and no commitment to higher education in that institution,” responded the Academic Freedom League in a letter to the university, dated early January, demanding the immediate reinstatement of Erika Lopez Prater.
A petition on the Change.org website in support of the scientist and calling for an investigation has garnered more than 7,600 signatures since December 24.
In France, a history and geography teacher was stabbed and then beheaded near his college in 2020 by a radicalized 18-year-old who accused him of showing cartoons of Mohammed in class.
The attack had rocked a country already weakened by a wave of jihadist attacks since the beginning of the decade, and revived passionate debates about freedom of expression, religion, secularism and the right to blaspheme.