Erika López Prater is an Art Historian of contemporary art and theory who has taught widely in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area and western Wisconsin for over a decade. In fall 2022, she was a new adjunct instructor at Hamline University in St. Paul, teaching an introductory art history course on World Art. In a unit on Islamic Art, after giving students multiple alerts about course content providing opt-out measures, she taught a masterpiece of medieval Islamic manuscript painting that included a depiction of an unveiled Prophet Muhammad receiving revelation from the Angel Gabriel. After a student complained about the image that she had opted in to view, Hamline administrators embarked on what the AAUP, in an independent investigation, described as a “de facto campaign of vilification” against López Prater. This included false, public denunciations and accusations of Islamophobia, and López Prater was summarily dismissed from her teaching position at Hamline.
Erika López Prater’s case highlights the double-bind many instructors face when pressured to simultaneously uphold academic freedom and turn their classrooms into “safe spaces” wherein students might mistake intellectual discomfort for harm. At a time when the proportion of contingent faculty is at an all-time high in higher education, her story illuminates not only the precarity of adjunct instructors, but the way in which the increasingly difficult access to tenure threatens the quality of education in American colleges and universities and ultimately erodes at the bedrock of academic freedom.
For her courage in defending unbiased pedagogy, the Academic Freedom, the Columbia Academic Freedom Council is honored to present Erika López Prater with the 2025 Academic Freedom Award.
