Keith Sampson recounts his racial harassment nightmare at University of Indiana-Purdue in the New York Post. Sampson, a communications student and part-time janitor, was reading Todd Tucker’s Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan during breaks. The book is in the university library.
The (affirmative action) office ruled that my “repeatedly reading the book . . . constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers.”
. . . the $106,000-a-year affirmative-action officer who declared me guilty of “racial harassment” never spoke to me or examined the book. My own union - the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees - sent an obtuse shop steward to stifle my freedom to read. He told me, “You could be fired,” that reading the book was “like bringing pornography to work.”
. . . After months of stonewalling, the university withdrew the charge, thanks to pressure from the press, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.
If any book can be banned, all books can be banned, Sampson points out.
For $106,000 per year the guy had better demonstrate his importance from time to time.
“If any book can be banned . . .”
This is an appeal to the slippery slope. Of course there are some things that would be inappropriate, but this book doesn’t qualify under any reasonable definition. This is a book that blacks may very well be interested in (KKK members getting beaten up?). This is an example of idiocy run amock.
the complaint may have been about the Notre Dame content … it did take place U of Indiana
“This is an appeal to the slippery slope.”
Unfortunately a lot of policy created by bureaucrats and politicians is intentionally obtuse to provide those slopes… which is why the founding fathers explicity laid out certain inalienable rights.