A couple of notes. First, there are reportedly 700 Muslims at Duke. Second, as to who made the threats, if they were made, they were almost certainly made by people who consider themselves to be Christians. Why pretend otherwise? As to whether they really are Christians or not, you can look up the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.
Two Duke studenst debated this last night and the one in favor of the chant was a Christian who spoke somewhat inarticulately about loving neighbors and being welcoming to all… I don’t recall the other one mentioning personal religion but rather stated satisfaction with the university reconsidering the decision and concern about the seeming institutional endorsement of any religion. Neither one was all that impressive but in my opinion, he won. Of course, I tend to agree with him but it really wasn’t close.
Well, a Duke professor published a pro-atheist book:
This atheist student says that she feels comfortable expressing her atheism at Duke, though she finds that there are far more agnostics in the community:
http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2014/01/29/-word
There at least used to be an active atheist student group holding events on campus; this page doesn’t make it clear whether they’re now dormant, but they were clearly operating on campus a few years back:
(This is a Facebook link, so it doesn’t show, but you can find it using Google).
Dawkins’ speech in 2012 included asking the crowd for advice on how to explain that religion is a load of rubbish:
http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2012/03/30/dawkins-discusses-magic-reality#.VLl5I2TF8ww
I don’t see any reason to conclude that the university would shut down proclamations from an atheist group.
“I am pretty sure that if the Atheist club wanted to announce that “God is imaginary” once a week on the loud speaker, the school would not allow it.”
Strongly disagree. Atheists make their point on the Duke campus every day"
I think there is a difference between
Situation A: a student atheist group handing out flyers or saying “God is imaginary” through a bullhorn on kind of an unscheduled, ad-hoc, as-the-spirit-moves-them basis (ha ha - see what I did there?), and
Situation B: Duke administration explicitly setting aside use of the campus loudspeaker every Friday at 2 pm for them for the student atheist group to announce that to the entire campus.
Let’s look at this a different way - College Democrats and College Republicans. Each of these groups are free to use college meeting spaces, hand out flyers publicizing events, urge people to vote for their candidate, etc. But the college doesn’t explicitly give them a platform with which to publicize their choice for office. I don’t think College Dems should have a loudspeaker with time set aside every Friday at 2 pm with which to publicize their views; do you? Even if it’s College Reps’ turn on Friday at 3 pm. If each of these groups wishes to have an event / rally, or a debate, that’s great - but the entire campus doesn’t need to be subjected to it.
Yes, I saw all of those google entries^, which in the aggregate are a far, far cry from describing Duke as having “very active” student atheist groups (Duke appears to have none currently that I can find), or atheism being expressed on campus daily (nothing at all on that that I can find). One professor, a speech given two years ago, and a Senior student who says she’s the only atheist she knows at Duke is all the evidence I can find for the premise. I give it three pinocchios :).
So, if there are 700 Muslims at Duke, and only a handful of atheists, how does that cut? Really, though, atheists have little to do with this case, because as I keep trying to assert, this is primarily a case involving accommodation of the exercise of religion, not a free speech case. Accordingly, I think arguments like “3 minutes is too long and it would be annoying” are relevant, whereas arguments about the wording of the call to prayer aren’t.
^^ Thanks for the clarification.
“So, if there are 700 Muslims at Duke, and only a handful of atheists, how does that cut? Really, though, atheists have little to do with this case, because as I keep trying to assert, this is primarily a case involving accommodation of the exercise of religion, not a free speech case. Accordingly, I think arguments like “3 minutes is too long and it would be annoying” are relevant, whereas arguments about the wording of the call to prayer aren’t.”
I do too.
I agree that atheists are not that relevant to the case, other than arguing that allowing only religious groups broadcast time gives religious students speech access that is denied to non-religious students. Atheists are not the only non-religious students, anyway. Agnostics and simply “no religion” students fall into that group, which amounts to 30% of the relevant population nation-wide.
Personally, it is the annoyance of the broadcast that I would object to.
“I give it three pinocchios”
What do you give the premise that if atheists asked for their turn using the loudspeaker, Duke would shut it down? I was trying to refute that point, not make some point of my own. Why hasn’t Duke done anything to quiet its atheists, if that premise is true?
And do I really need data to support the idea that atheist views are expressed at Duke every day? We’re talking about an institution with 14,000 students and 35,000 employees. I’d bet a lot of money that Communist, Mormon, and Ayn Rand-ian views are expressed there every day, too.
Hanna, it’s the over the loudspeaker part that people are objecting to. The Muslim students are expressing there views on campus now and no-one minds a bit.
To my knowledge, no atheists have asked to broadcast from the church bell tower. If they do, I hope they are given an equal opportunity. I wasn’t refuting that premise of yours, only the one asserting that there is evidence of an active atheist presence on campus. And if it turns out that your are correct, all the better. I think we ought to be portraying colleges accurately on this website, is really my point.
Well, we don’t know that no one minds. We know that no one has made a stink about it. But no one objects to the church bells either, and speaking only for myself, I know perfectly well that they are a Christian call to prayer and a declaration of faith by the organization doing the ringing.
For the nth time, this case isn’t really about the Muslims broadcasting their “point of view” from the bell tower. If that’s what they were asking for, I feel confident that it would be denied, as well as a similar request from any other group. What they are asking for is something that is a normal part of the practice of what it is to be a Muslim: the call to prayer delivered from the mosque. As I said, it is just like the “angelus,” which is a church bell message that it’s time to pray.
What makes this case harder than, say, a case about whether to give Jewish students keys that allow them to avoid using electronic keys on the Sabbath, is that there is content in this particular religious practice. If I were a judge evaluating this case, I would consider the primary and secondary purposes of this practice. How much of the purpose is for religious practice by the adherents of the religion, and how much is intended to convey a message to other people? As I noted above, the plan to translate the call into English cuts against the practice argument (although it may be that a significant number of Muslims at Duke don’t speak Arabic). If I concluded that the primary purpose of the practice was exercise of religion, then I would focus on how much inconvenience to others the accommodation would create. Maybe I’d say a 3-minute broadcast is too much. Maybe I’d put restrictions on the decibel levels. But this would be the same kind of analysis I’d do for the Orthodox Jew who wanted non-electronic keys. I might not agree to make all the locks in the university open to a mechanical key, but only some of them. I would not, however, consider simply hearing the beliefs of another religion to be an “inconvenience.”
To give another example, which shows how you might have to draw lines, imagine if the Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness group on campus came and asked for keys that would access all the dorms, because part of their religious practice is to go from door to door proselytizing. Here, I think I’d say that, since the essence of this practice is speech directed to people who aren’t adherents of the religion, I’d analyze it in terms of free speech rather than exercise of religion, and thus I’d only give them the key if any other group that wanted to spread its point of view could also get the key.
Reasonable people can disagree about why, exactly, the Muslim students want to have this call to worship. I don’t know what they said about it–maybe they said it was partly to educate other students, which would weaken their case if I were the decisionmaker. I don’t know about that.
IMO, giving keys is NOT the same as broadcasting. Broadcasting isn’t a risk of harm unlike giving keys to strangers.
Apropos of not very much, but interesting: I spent yesterday visiting Southeastern Oklahoma State University, and saw a banner in the student union promoting meetings of the Freethinkers Society “for atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and secularists.” Now, this is a public school, so it’s no surprise that the banner was permitted. I was just heartened to see that here in rural Oklahoma, there were students far outside the mainstream who felt comfortable enough to promote their group publicly. I thought it said good things about the community on campus.
Well, the inconvenience of giving the keys is much greater, in my opinion, than allowing the broadcast. Imagine if an Orthodox Jewish student asked that all pork products be banned from campus. You’d probably deny that request as inconveniencing too many other people–but you might grant a request that some particular dining area be kept free of pork products, especially if you had a substantial number of students who keep kosher. This is how you do the analysis when you are trying to determine how far you have to (or should) do to accommodate the free exercise of religion. It can be pretty hard to draw the lines. But my point is that it’s a different analysis from the analysis of who gets access for forums for free speech.
Well, there’s a fine line between “accommodating” and “endorsing” various religions. Publics can and do the former. Witness the UCs, who chopped an already brief three week winter break down to two this year to accommodate the Jewish high holidays falling during move-in. The percentage of Jewish students in the UC system and Muslim students at Duke is approximately equal (~9%).
Listening to a brief broadcast each week (if one is even within hearing distance on the massive 1000 acre campus) seems rather less inconvenient than losing a week of winter break. YMMV!
I have no problem with accommodating the needs of students on a diverse campus. Like the LAX case, this is something that is causing much more of a kerfuffle elsewhere than on Duke’s campus.
Just out of curiosity, are there other colleges in the US in which this occurs? Maybe it’s just unfamiliarity on my part. I have never seen this in the US, though I’ve seen the call to prayer when touring in Muslim countries.
Interesting, @warblersrule, although I never claimed that publics are exempt from accommodating various religions. I said that sort of thing is limited there. I still haven’t seen a cross in a UC classroom. And given that winter break is largely to celebrate a Christian holiday, I suppose it’s hard for the UCs to oppose giving Jews time off for theirs. But point taken: these are issues that do exist, on some level, in publics as well.