It's Déjà Vu All Over Again. Again.

Strains of Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” waft through Curmie’s consciousness. Well, not the whole song, but the key line of the chorus: “When will they ever learn?” 

You will perhaps recall, Gentle Reader, the brouhaha at Hamline University a few months ago, when adjunct professor Erika López Prater was de facto fired for showing two images of the prophet Muhammad in her art history class, despite the fact that she had warned students both in the course syllabus and on the day of the class in question, giving them the option to opt out of that viewing. 

A few weeks later, Macalester College faced a similar challenge when an art exhibition by Iranian-American artist Taravat Talepasand was deemed offensive by a Muslim student. Macalester handled the situation a lot better than Hamline did, but they did take some pretty extreme short-term censorial actions. Curmie wrote about this story, too, under the headline “It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again.” 

Professor Behmooz

And now… another one, necessitating the title you see above. Like the proverbial bad penny, these incidents keep re-appearing. There are, to be sure, a few notable differences between what’s currently happening at San Francisco State University and what happened at Hamline. 

Dr. Maziar Behrooz teaches history (as opposed to art history). He’s an associate professor (presumably tenured), not an adjunct. He is Iranian-born, so his knowledge of Islamic culture is that of long-term direct contact. He did not provide an opt-out for students who objected to seeing the image. At present, there’s only an investigation as opposed to dismissal or any other sanctions. 

But the basic story is (cue Stevie Nicks: it’s a songfest today!) hauntingly familiar. Behrooz has been teaching the course in the history of the Islamic world from 500-1700, and using an image of Muhammad as part of that course, for years. That means that scores, probably hundreds, of students have taken the class without incident. Indeed, if there were so much as a complaint on an anonymous course evaluation form, it’s the responsibility of the department chair and/or dean to find out what happened and to pursue the matter with Professor Behrooz if that seemed appropriate. 

No such action appears to have ever been taken, but a complaint from a single (currently anonymous) student has led to an investigation by the university’s Office of Equity Programs & Compliance: definition by example of the heckler’s veto… not to mention that the investigation started in March, long after the alleged infraction in the fall semester. 

Behrooz says that he “was not prepared for somebody to be offended, in a secular university, talking about history rather than religion.” Perhaps he should have been, but remember that the incident at Hamline hadn’t yet made headlines. He also speaks from first-hand experience that the type of drawing he shows in class can be bought at markets in Tehran (where he grew up!) near holy shrines, and that many Shiite Muslims have such drawings in their homes. Clearly, the prohibition against images of the prophet are not universal in the Islamic world. Curmie thinks we can pretty much take it for granted that if it’s permissible in Tehran, it’s probably okay for a lot of Muslims. 

Predictably, FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression) has gotten into the act, noting that “SFSU administrators haven’t learned anything from Hamline’s mistakes.” Well, duh.  Hit it, Pete: “when will they ever learn”? 

Side note: SFSU earned the dubious distinction of drawing the Ire of FIRE (great band name, yes?) twice in a single day. The other case was the shouting down of former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who was invited to campus by the local chapter of Turning Point USA to speak about gender and sports, presumably concentrating on the Gaines’s opposition to allowing trans women to compete in women’s competitions. 

This is part of a particularly disturbing trend on university campuses, which ought to be a haven for the interplay of opposing ideas, but have often lapsed into sites for ideological shouting matches which actively suppress free expression. To be blunt: Curmie doesn’t give a rat’s ass if you’re “offended” by the ideas of someone whose views you find abhorrent, and he’s pretty damned certain that you weren’t “harmed.” (News flash: they’re not real thrilled with your positions, either.) No one is forcing you to agree. You’re even welcome to protest, provided you don’t disrupt the event per se. That’s not really a very difficult concept to understand. But the heckler’s veto, even if invoked by the majority in a room, has no place in a democratic society. 

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons. In a lengthy letter to SFSU President Lynn Mahoney, Sabrina Conza of FIRE writes that:

As a public institution bound by the First Amendment, SFSU’s actions and decisions—including the pursuit of disciplinary sanctions—must not violate faculty expressive freedoms, including academic freedom to determine whether and how to introduce or approach material that may be challenging, upsetting, or even deeply offensive to some students. As such, SFSU cannot take adverse action against faculty, including initiating an investigation, with the implication of potential punishment, for exercising the pedagogical autonomy to display instructionally relevant material in the classroom, regardless of whether that material offends any students.

Clearly, the 1st amendment/academic freedom argument is paramount here, but it’s important to note something else, too: that the mere fact of launching an investigation is itself a punishment. Professor Behrooz, like Dr. López Prater before him, faces unwarranted scrutiny by the academic community. Damage to his reputation has already been done. 

FIRE, by the way, received an almost immediate response from Robert King, the Director of Communications in the SFSU President’s office. First off, a Director of Communications who, in a business email, addresses a correspondent he presumably doesn’t know by her first name? Not cool, dude. 

But the claim that “once an investigation is initiated, the University has limited ability to dismiss it” is a particularly laughable exercise in circular reasoning. They shouldn’t have opened the investigation to begin with, of course—the case against Professor Bermooz is a nothingburger if ever there was one—but you can’t claim to be incapable of fixing a problem of your own creation because you yourselves created a stupid policy (note: not a law or anything like that, a university policy) that forbids you from dismissing a case that obviously has no merit. 

Perhaps, as King hints in his letter, the university is actually trying to amend their policy to prioritize the 1st amendment and academic freedom. Three responses:

1). Curmie will believe it when he sees it, and it’s already too little, too late.

2). Where the hell is the university counsel? It’s understandable, albeit problematic, that the president might not know that what she’s doing (or at least condoning) is a violation not merely of academic freedom, but of constitutional rights. But Curmie is willing to bet that the head legal beagle at SFSU is pulling down a salary several times what Curmie ever made as a professor; it’s not exactly unreasonable to expect this person to do their damned job and keep the university from making all the wrong kind of headlines.

3). It’s not like the Hamline case failed to get any traction in the national media, especially in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, which every college administrator in the country ought to be reading assiduously. Hamline didn’t come out unscathed; San Francisco State won’t, either.

OK, one note of advice for Professor Behmooz: Don’t just “consider” the “compromise” of telling students you’re going to show an image that may offend a small handful of them; do it. This, of course, should have been the beginning and the end of the investigation: “hey, Professor, none of us wants to go through this again, so just give a little warning next time… if you do, we’ll absolutely have your back.” 

That said, however, the university looks a lot worse in this than the professor does. When will they ever learn?