The Culture War We All Lose
Our current culture war sprang out of the ideological hothouses of academia, and this is where you still see it taking some of its most intense forms. But the culture war is increasingly revealing itself as a war against culture, from both sides.
The Scopes Mohammed Trial
One of the more revealing skirmishes has been happening at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. In October of last year, an adjunct professor showed her art history students images of the Muslim prophet Mohammed as drawn by Muslim artists. These famous images have long been a staple of art history classes, and more so in recent years—ironically, in an attempt to satisfy the demands of “diversity.” A very thorough New York Times report notes that “showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to ‘decolonize the canon’—that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model.”
But it is one of the hallmarks of illiberal and authoritarian systems that their requirements are arbitrary and unpredictable. There are no clear rules for what you can do, because it is really about who has power over you.
In this case, the leader of a Muslim student group filed a complaint, and the Hamline administration—following the usual academic practice in these cases—cowered in fear.
Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder….
After Dr. López Prater showed the image, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action.
Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.
This is an attempt to make an American university subservient to the restrictive views of one religion, and not just one religion, but one fanatical sect within that religion. As the Times report notes:
Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.
“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”
The article’s kicker is even better:
Dr. Safi has his own personal image of the prophet. When he was 14, his family fled to the United States from Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war. He packed an image of Muhammad holding a Quran into one of the family’s few suitcases.
That image now hangs on his wall at home.
I don’t think I even need to argue that if a Christian religious proscription—say, a ban on teaching evolution—were used as grounds for firing a professor, we would recognize this as an unacceptable case of religious obscurantism. The Scopes Monkey Trial was famously fought over that issue. Will this case—and the fired Hamline professor’s lawsuit—give us a Scopes Mohammed Trial?
In January, after this case received scrutiny in the national press, Hamline tried to partially walk back its stance, and the case set off a faculty rebellion against Hamline’s president. This may mark something of a turning point. If “wokeness” has the characteristics of a religion, it is a religion for those who are otherwise secular. To discover that their new belief system requires them to obey the restrictions of one of the older and more traditionally Puritanical creeds is the kind of shock that will start people asking questions.
The fact that it takes the form of banning art and erasing knowledge makes the issue even clearer.
From BANANAs to NANAAs
The Hamline story is a particularly attention-grabbing case in a culture war that reverberates around us in a thousand smaller ways.
I was put in mind of some religious sects’ prohibition on the portrayal of the human form while observing the latest round of iconoclasm here in Charlottesville, Virginia. After taking down our local statues of Confederate generals—which has a certain logic to it—and then going on to remove statues of just about everybody else, the local government is now removing the names of historical figures from public schools.
What is interesting is that they are not picking new historical heroes after whom to name our schools. They have instead adopted a policy of never naming anything after anyone.
In the last two weeks, Albemarle [County] renamed its Meriwether Lewis Elementary School to Ivy and Charlottesville renamed Clark and Venable elementary schools to Summit and Trailblazers…. [T]he county school board voted to change the name—despite the fact that the school’s students and local community members voted to keep it.
After hearing community members argue over whether Lewis was worthy of being honored in a school name, the school board decided it had enough of debating the merits of historical people and voted that none of its schools will be named after humans.
We’ve heard of BANANAs. These are NANAAs: Name Absolutely Nothing After Anyone.
I understand the dilemma. I am a long-ago graduate of Woodrow Wilson Junior High School, a middle school in the Midwest named after a once-revered Progressive icon who is now hated—with good reason—by everyone across the political spectrum and in each corner of the Nolan Chart.
But this case in Albemarle County seems like a distillation of the cowardice of our era, in which everyone is so hunkered down in terror of criticism that nobody is willing to stick their necks out and come up with a school name that might express anything more substantive than “Ivy.”
The Culture War We All Lose
Attacks on academic freedom are not limited to the left, but it will take a separate article and several podcast to survey the educational putsch being launched by conservatives in Florida. All of this is forthcoming.
Yet when we focus on outright attacks on academic freedom, I think we might be missing a much bigger picture: the destruction of university humanities programs as such. Consider that while the Hamline case is being debated, another small school, Virginia’s Marymount University, announced that it is eliminating nine humanities majors.
We can debate how history should be taught, what should be taught, and who should be hired to teach it. But what if the question is whether it will be taught, and whether schools will hire anyone at all?
University of Washington history professor Daniel Bessner lays out the facts.
[A]s Americans fight over their history, the historical profession itself is in rapid—maybe even terminal—decline. Twelve days after Dr. Sweet published his column, the AHA released a “Jobs Report” that makes for grim reading: The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic.
The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. The work of historians has been “de-professionalized,” and people like myself, who have tenure track jobs, will be increasingly rare in coming years. This is true for all academic fields, not just history.
He describes some of the causes, including the fact that universities have hired thousands more administrators while cutting back on full-time, career positions for actual teaching. “Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans.” The US government has poured billions of dollars of subsidies and government-backed student loan money into the universities, and it has all been absorbed by a bloated bureaucracy.
He also describes the result.
Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them. It’s implausible to expect scholars with insecure jobs to offer bold and innovative claims about history when they can easily be fired for doing so….
Without professional historians, history education will be left more and more in the hands of social media influencers, partisan hacks, and others unconcerned with achieving a complex, empirically informed understanding of the past.
Bessner names only the easy targets on the right, the kind that New York Times readers are likely to revile, like the conservative pop history books pumped out by Bill O’Reilly. But this also explains the Times’s own notoriously inaccurate 1619 Project—another case in which history was written by an activist journalist, while objections from academic historians were ignored or shouted down.
If culture warriors in the universities have begun to view fields like history as merely a battleground for partisan political activists—whether on the left or the right—then the academic study of history will seem to be non-essential, and the field will be left entirely to the activists.
That is a culture war in which we will all lose.