Is the Hamline University Saga a Shift?

You might recall that an adjunct professor was let go from Hamline University after a Muslim student complained about a depiction of the prophet Muhammad shown in class. The immediate responses were not terribly surprising to me. Given past incidents, I assumed that college administrators would have an interest towards affirming the student's complaint, no matter how unreasonable it was. This panned out, with the university president issuing a very bizarre statement where she presented non-sequiturs like:

To suggest that the university does not respect academic freedom is absurd on its face. Hamline is a liberal arts institution, the oldest in Minnesota, the first to admit women, and now led by a woman of color. To deny the precepts upon which academic freedom is based would be to undermine our foundational principles.

What do the demographics of the university president have to do with academic freedom? Fuck if I know.

Similarly, I also assumed that non-profit organizations would have an interest to bolster their profile by seizing upon the incident. This too panned out, with the local Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter condemning the professor as Islamophobic. Jaylani Hussein, the chapter's executive director even dismissed the fact that the professor went out of her way to add a content warning and said "In reality a trigger warning is an indication that you are going to do harm." Even worse, during a December 8th meeting at Hamline, Hussein even said “If you want to know how people respond, you’ve seen what happened in the horrible tragedies of Charlie Hebdo, God forbid what happened at that time and everything else. Muslims revere our Prophet in a meaningful way, and regardless of whatever you are teaching, you have to respect them.”

Since then, things have changed. First, the national CAIR organization felt the need to step in and rebuke the local chapter, and issued a (tepid) defense of the scorned professor. Then, Hamline University faculty just voted overwhelmingly (71-12) to ask the president to step down. For a defense of freedom of expression, the statement they issued is (at least on its face) pretty good.

Both of these developments surprised me, and it made me wonder whether this is a sign of a potential turning point on the topic of suppressed freedom of expression on campus.