Everywhere we look, we're being failed by institutions that are "supposed" to protect us — and not just those, like the police, that progressives have good reason to distrust. Take the recent example of Hamline University in Minnesota, which firing an adjunct art professor, Erika López Prater, for showing her class a famous medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad. Hamline failed both the professor and its Muslim students, though in different ways.
As was widely reported, López Prater gave both written and verbal advance warnings for devout Muslim students who may regard such images as sacrilegious — a widely-held view today that was not so dominant in the past. But one student who disregarded the warnings complained afterwards, leading the school's administration to label López Prater's actions as "Islamophobic" and terminate her promised future employment — a decision move vigorously opposed by the Muslim Public Affairs Council as well as the University of Minnesota's Department of Art History.
