Hamline University’s Unilateral Approach to Intersectionality and the Challenge of American Pluralism

It’s just another day in the neighborhood to read a story about conflicts in the culture wars represented as either the right’s fevered march towards reviving the 19^th century or the left’s delusional quest to look at the 19^th century as if it was the 21^st. 

For every Ron DeSantis issuing Comstock Law purges of public-school libraries using his version of the Ministry of Love there’s a school board looking to change the names of public schools named after persons who might be linked to injustice. Usually, these conflict narratives are framed along easy binary lines of Right vs. Left, “racist” vs. “woke,” “TERF” vs. “trans ideology” or some other either/or contest. In the old days we would have just said conservative vs. liberal, but those nomenclature mean almost nothing anymore, after years of media and political framing and reframing of the labels each side assigns to the other. 

A recent story featured in this ongoing struggle of idiocy versus inanity is that of Hamline University. The difference between the Hamline story and those typically highlighted in establishment media is that it’s not a red against blue, lib against MAGA kind of smackdown; the contest here is between groups that are typically aligned and assigned to the Left: administrators of a university to address intersectionality battling academics inside and outside that university.

If you read articles or listen to podcasts posted at True Thirty with any regularity, you’re likely someone aware of the Hamline University calamity. The story had been groaning like a frozen Minnesota lake for about a month, covered by conservative media like The Daily Wire, The Washington Examiner, and Reason. It was also covered by the literary freedom organization PEN American and the Chronicle for Higher Education. But when the New York Times reported on it January 10, 2023 the ice broke, with the story washing over the international stage as an example of sensitivity run amok, or academic freedom’s suppression by religion, or intersectionality taken to an extreme, or snowflake children melting under the light of adult pedagogy, or insert-here your conflict of the times. I won’t go into all the details, but here’s a summary:

An adjunct professor of art history at Hamline University, a private liberal arts school and Minnesota’s oldest university, taught a class online on October 6 that featured late medieval images of the Prophet Mohammed. By most accounts the professor, aware that some members of the Muslim community believe – though not stated explicitly in the Quran -- that physical depiction of the Prophet Mohammed is considered idolatrous and blasphemous, gave warning in the syllabus issued at the beginning of term of her intention to show these examples of Islamic art, as well as in a preamble to the class on October 6 in which they were featured. This, however, did not assuage a student in the class, who also happens to be the president of the university’s Muslim Student’s Association. The student complained, saying she was offended and made to feel uncomfortable and violated and unsafe. The professor had an offer to teach in the spring semester that the University rescinded, and the university’s president and administration issued a strong rebuke of the professor’s actions, calling them “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

In the wake of the NYT story and all the subsequent coverage, pressure mounted on all parties involved in the original incident. Hamline University’s president, Dr. Fayneese Miller, doubled down on her statement that respect for students’ feelings “should have superseded academic freedom.” The head of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) said that the professor showing the images of Mohammad amounted to bigotry and, despite the national office of CAIR coming out in support of the professor, likened those who do not share the belief that showing the image of the Prophet amounted to blasphemy to fringe extremists or teaching a class that says nice things about Hitler.

Once you’ve got that out there, you can be sure the heat will melt the rest of that frozen lake and the water will turn into flood. The blowback now includes a lawsuit of religious discrimination filed by the erstwhile adjunct against Hamline; an academic freedom complaint from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) calling for the university to lose its accreditation, a letter issued by the Board of Trustees and President Miller that reads

“In the interest of hearing from and supporting our Muslim students, language was used that does not reflect our sentiments on academic freedom. Based on all that we have learned, we have determined that our usage of the term ‘Islamophobic’ was therefore flawed,” 

and a majority of the Hamline faculty have voted “no confidence” in President Miller and ask that she resign.

All that’s been written about this issue has largely focused on a combination of the coddling of the modern American college student’s feelings at the expense of the grand mission of higher education. 

But what really makes this issue so important, and so difficult to feel only one way about it, is that it is goes to the very complex heart of nearly every conflict that rages through American institutions, politics, and across the public square: which rights and interests are prioritized in a society that has as its ideal objective to maximize the good of a plurality?

The conflict between a student feeling her religious rights were violated and a professional academic’s right to teach to her subject that ostensibly precipitates that violation raises questions about to what extent American institutions must comport themselves to satisfy the beliefs, feelings, or even well-being of any given interest. This is a key challenge to any society that strives for pluralism. When is it okay to prohibit the showing of an image of the Prophet Mohammed to allay the wishes of Sunni Muslims but not prohibit the reading of Walt Whitman because he was gay, and some Christians think homosexuality is a sin? Does an historian of Germany not teach the rise of National Socialism because it might cause pain to the descendants of Holocaust survivors? Should a law school not teach the Roe v. Wade case because some students believe life begins at conception?

If America wants to preserve its E pluribus unum status – and there are lots of signs this status has been iffy for some time – it must be able to reasonably and safely converse and compromise over what is important even when what’s important doesn’t cohere or works at cross-purposes.

Hamline’s gesture honoring one important principle was to sacrifice another. Hamline, to appear to address genuine concerns of Islamophobia that have been present on campus and recognize a valued student population, devalued a tenet of higher education’s mission of academic rigor and freedom of expression. The University’s administration weighed one thing as being more important than another.

These are not small matters. They are complex. And complexity requires thoughtful deliberation. Our culture has evolved to wanting satisfaction so immediately that anything less than immediate is akin to nothing. Of course, incrementalism is tantamount to doing nothing when that incrementalism is glacial. And something not covered much in this story is what Muslim students have to say about their experiences on campus and their experiences in the wider environment.

A recent piece from The Sahan Journal, a nonprofit digital publication covering Minnesota’s refugee and immigrant community, gave a well-reported look at how the Muslim students think and feel about the issue (the campus paper, The Oracle, though as to be expected, decidedly pro-student, has also done some yeoman’s investigative reporting). This group has been frequently spoken of in the media but rarely if at all spoken TO by the media. To them, the matter of what happened on October 6 in an online class was a blip on a radar of more frequent blips on and around campus over time. 

Now, years of working in media and marketing has left me skeptical and cynical about what people born and raised in a 24-hour media memesphere say about their feelings or what they say about their reactions to those feelings. But what these students do say has a lot in common, suggesting more than just a constructed media-ready narrative. They’ve got legitimate complaints that haven’t been properly heard. The student who complained is a Muslim and a black woman. I think only Native American women are less acknowledged by mainstream institutions and media. To think that there isn’t a larger background context against which she was responding is to be willfully blind to the way most of the systems around us work. There is something “right” about the faults against which she is pushing, but this event is not really where the fault lies.

The other part of this story that hasn’t gotten much daylight is how the university’s chosen form of sanction reveals the dark underbelly of the higher education business model. Hamline used this occasion to ostensibly address ongoing issues of intersectionality on campus by punishing a member of a labor underclass upon which the business model of higher education depends, namely, the adjunct professor. 

To cut costs while raising tuition, higher education’s teaching force has gone from just under 80% of tenured or tenure-track in 1969 to 50% being adjunct professors in 2020. As prices for higher education have gone up, universities and their students have entered a vendor-customer relationship. Those higher tuition fees have gone towards campus amenities (and more administrators) that might improve the customer experience but have little impact on the final product. What Hamline’s president and administration did was akin to advertising to potential customers that those customers will get the experience they desire.

It’s also a case of “the customer is always right.” A student at Hamline for a year comes with $46K+ in tuition and fees.  An adjunct professor, especially a new one (the art professor at Hamline received her PhD in 2019) typically makes only a few thousand dollars a class. And an adjunct comes without any protections that a tenured or tenure-track professor would have.

And so, money brought in by tuition and fees are being soaked up by nice dorm lobbies and administrators and bureaucrats who claim to act in the interests of the mission of higher education but who are largely removed from the practice of that mission. Not unlike the modern politician, acting to preserve their positions and get more “customers” (voters and donors) rather than to advance a cause or better a world.

One final thing, which hasn’t been mentioned at all from what I can tell, is the hint of generational conflict. The need for victory of self-esteem over all other considerations, is a particular feature of younger generations. Not just that feelings matter, but that feelings matter MOST. The Hamline controversy is related to, if not the same as, other controversies regarding how people feel versus how things are. Whether it be higher education, the media, or politics, how someone feels about something often takes pole position when lined up on the track against other things to consider.

When I first read the NYT report, I thought of a movie review I’d read recently. Zadie Smith in her essay review of “Tár” in the New York Review of Books put forth an insightful observation about the difference between GenX (which she and I both are) and the current “youngs” is that for us what always mattered most was:

“Is it interesting?” Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fit, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analyzed, just like anything else. 

Whereas for a younger generation, evils and flaws are judged though they are all there is. The impression that examination and interrogation borne of interest and fascination is no longer considered an important part of experiencing the world unnerves those of us for whom they have been the most important part of engaging that world. Coming of age intellectually at a time when the world was a text to be analyzed (thanks, French post structuralists!) and that text didn’t necessarily have to be bonded forever to its creator; that the creation of the creator was its own being, separate, like a child or Frankenstein’s monster. The creation owed something to its creator, but it was not OWNED by its creator. The creation gets to belong to anyone who wants to behold it. This is a concept that conflicts completely with a generation that sees a person’s work as the person themselves (Smith suggests this is a result of growing up online); and it is certainly opposed to any religious precept that forbids that work of art to exist in the first place. 

The Hamline University debacle reveals myriad contests in the current culture, but all of them surround this society’s most fundamental precept and its primary existential threat: that diversity is essential, that more than one perspective on any issue is crucial to understanding its complete truth, and that each of us as individuals matter more than the sum of our institutional parts. We’re at a point where solving for American pluralism is like transporting nitroglycerin away from a preschool while on a pogo stick. It’s dangerous, but it must be done if there’s going to be a future for those kids.