Via College Fix:

University of Minnesota faculty members were asked earlier this year to take down posters advertising an academic panel because they included an “offensive” recreated cartoon picture of Mohammed – the one made famous by Charlie Hebdo earlier this year.

The posters had advertised a panel discussion by various professors as well as a Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper cartoonist. Co-sponsored by a dozen academic departments in the College of Liberal Arts following the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January, it was titled “Can One Laugh at Everything? Satire and Free Speech After Charlie” and intended to generate an academic discussion of the tragedy and its consequences.

Flyers promoting the event featured the now-infamous image of the prophet as it was printed in Charlie Hebdo. The word “censored” was stamped in red diagonally across the cartoon image.

The organizers discussed whether or not to put the cartoon image of Mohammad on the flyer, but eventually decided it would be appropriate given the subject of the event—free speech and satire, Inside Higher Ed reported this week. But after the flyers were distributed online and hung around campus, some members of the Muslim student community wanted them taken down.

In phone calls and a petition, nearly 275 people complained to the campus Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, calling the flyer “blasphemous” and insulting to Muslims, the Minnesota Daily campus newspaper reports. The complainants included students, faculty, a retired professor and random individuals unaffiliated with the university, who called the flyer “very offensive.”

The petition read in part that the flyer “violated our religious identity and hurt our deeply held religious affiliations for our beloved prophet (peace be upon him). Knowing that these caricatures hurt and are condemned by 1.75 billion Muslims in the world, the university should not have recirculated/reproduced them.”