EAST LANSING, Mich.
A Michigan State University professor has apologized for the “tactless and hyperbolic language” he used in an e-mail to a Muslim student group in which he labeled Muslims “brutal and uncivilized” and told them to “return to their ancestral homelands.”
Muslim organizations had asked Michigan State University to reprimand Dr. Indrek S. Wichman, a tenured professor in the mechanical engineering department, for sending a Muslim student group the e-mail.
“It was not intended to impugn the integrity and decency of all Muslims in the United States,” Wichman wrote last month in The State News, MSU’s student newspaper. Wichman said his e-mail attempted to address the issue of free speech, which he felt the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) was trying to suppress through its protests against published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Wichman’s e-mail garnered national media attention and prompted calls to the university from people on both sides of the issue, some seeking his reprimand and some who agreed with what he wrote or supported his right to write it, said Terry Denbow, vice president for university relations.
“Clearly there are misunderstandings about academic freedom and what First Amendment rights are,” Denbow says. Nonetheless, Denbow says the university looked into Wichman’s record to determine if any discrimination complaints had been lodged against him. They found none.
“He was cautioned that if this became persistent, it would become basis of a complaint under our anti-discrimination policy. But this, in and of itself, did not constitute that,” Denbow says.
