Islamophobia

Minouche Shafik has reigned as president of Columbia University. Culture wars, like the kind involving actual armies, have casualties. Shafik is the fourth Ivy League president to step down in the last nine months. She was proceeded by Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay at Harvard. Magill and Gay were casualties of their hapless testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on December 5 and, in Gay’s case, the subsequent revelations about her serial plagiarism. She was also proceeded by Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University, who hung up her mortar board in June, without an assist from the House committee but citing the “enormous, unexpected challenges” of having to deal with antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The latest news in the Hamline University saga is that a large majority of the faculty — seventy-one of ninety-two members — have called on university president Fayneese Miller to resign. Miller had played the principal part in the dismissal of art history instructor Erika López Prater, after Prater had shown two images of the Prophet Mohammed in her online art history class. One image was a slide of a fourteenth-century painting by a Muslim artist; the other was Muslim painting from the sixteenth century in which the Prophet is veiled. Condemnation of the Hamline administration for dismissing Prater has been nearly universal in American higher education.