February 13, 2008
Hiring process result fair; bigotry claims unfounded
I feel compelled to respond to Mark Page’s article on the proposed partnership accommodation of professor Scott Lucas, which occurred during intersession in January of this year. The claim that attitudes of bigotry pervaded this hiring process is unfounded, and the result reached in this case was on balance a fair one. Partnership accommodations are considered when a job is offered a candidate who desires her or his partner to also join the faculty without a full search process. Accommodations are themselves controversial academic acts since they truncate and often avoid the full airing of regular faculty hiring.
From the outset of the process, any comment I have made about Professor Lucas’s accommodation was preceded my deference to the department or program’s discretion in making this decision – whether it be liberal studies or history. I am not an expert on sharia law or on Islam, and Professor Lucas strikes me as an impressive and accomplished scholar of the history of Islamic law.
As a member of the Outfield Alliance (a coalition of GLBTIQ faculty, graduate students and their supporters at UM), I did feel compelled to attend Professor Lucas’s presentations, which were given unfortunately during intersession when many students and faculty were not on campus. Part of that compulsion arose from my awareness that sharia law, adopted by some countries around the world, requires capital punishment for same-sex practices. In August of 2007, according to the BBC, eighteen men were remanded in prison following their arrest for alleged sodomy in Nigeria and now face the death penalty. In 2006, two gay teens were hung in Iran for their same-sex practices. The violent treatment of gays and lesbians under states following sharia law, according to Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, continues throughout the world today.
I attended Professor Lucas’s presentations to find out how he would, as a professor of Islam and scholar of sharia law, address these particular issues and more importantly how he would explore, as a teacher, the kind of violence that is now being perpetrated under states that call for violent penalties against queer men and women. Professor Lucas’s position, from my understanding, that we must work within sharia law to moderate it, struck me as troubling. At no time did Professor Lucas mention the current violence at work in the world under the color of the very material he studies and critiques with considerable intelligence. At no time during either of the talks that I attended did Professor Lucas, to my knowledge, openly condemn the stoning or hanging of gays, though on numerous occasions he had the opportunity to discuss the seriousness of this violence and more broadly the controversial insertion of sectarian law into secular societies like ours.
I doubt very seriously that Professor Lucas would approve of the recent violence and calls for violence by those who work within sharia law, but I was given no reason to believe, from my exposure to his presentations, that he would be able to teach this current legal crisis with the kind of broad equanimity that would fully acknowledge the threat to gays and lesbians that the adoption of sharia law poses. People are currently being whipped, stoned, hung and cut up for loving people of the same sex in certain ways. This violence is real and it is tied, for better or worse, to the very law that Professor Lucas studies, even if his focus is primarily on medieval studies. To my mind, the best professor of Islamic religion must confront these atrocities head on, put them on the table, and talk about how as students and scholars we can address them with sensitivity to the sometimes competing interests of Islam and human rights. Professor Lucas did not strike me as the kind of teacher that met that standard.
My assessment, of course, might be misguided, and from the outset, I have thought about how important Professor Lucas’s academic freedom is, how important it is that we have teachers on campus who express all views. For this reason, I have deferred to the governing departments that were considering the accommodation. On the other hand, as a member of a group that has fought for the introduction of partnership health benefits at UM, fought for a queer curriculum and fought against the continued violence against gays and lesbians in Montana, I feel quite unequivocally that I have right to express my views about a professor who would be teaching a course on Islamic religion to a broad range of students on this campus –including students who practice same-sex love.
Casey Charles,
Professor, English
member, Outfield Alliance
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