If anyone doubts that the contemporary left, at least as it is represented in many institutions of higher learning, is crawling with enemies of free intellectual inquiry, consider this story from Purdue. Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the Wall Street Journal:
The story began prosaically enough. Keith Sampson, a student employee on the janitorial staff earning his way toward a degree, was in the habit of reading during work breaks. Last October he was immersed in "Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan."
Mr. Sampson was in short order visited by his union representative, who informed him he must not bring this book to the break room, and that he could be fired. Taking the book to the campus, Mr. Sampson says he was told, was "like bringing pornography to work." That it was a history of the battle students waged against the Klan in the 1920s in no way impressed the union rep.
The assistant affirmative action officer who next summoned the student was similarly unimpressed. Indeed she was, Mr. Sampson says, irate at his explanation that he was, after all, reading a scholarly book. "The Klan still rules Indiana," Marguerite Watkins told him – didn't he know that? Mr. Sampson, by now dazed, pointed out that this book was carried in the university library. Yes, she retorted, you can get Klan propaganda in the library.
The university has allowed no interviews with Ms. Watkins or any other university official involved in the case. Still, there can be no disputing the contents of the official letter that set forth the university's case.
Mr. Sampson stood accused of "openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers." The statement, signed by chief affirmative action officer Lillian Charleston, asserted that her office had completed its investigation of the charges brought by Ms. Nakea William, his co-worker – that Mr. Sampson had continued, despite complaints, to read a book on this "inflammatory topic." "We conclude," the letter informed him, "that your conduct constitutes racial harassment. . . ." A very serious matter, with serious consequences, it went on to point out.
Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. Mr. Sampson (no word on Delila yet) managed to get help from the ACLU and FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and the Purdue administration quickly back-peddled, denying that it had ever said or did what it said and did in print.
But one has to wonder just what kind of people these are who regard "openly reading a book" as a crime? Bozos, to be certain. But malevolent Bozos, whose every instinct is antithetical to freedom of thought. Every honest person on the left, with a genuine concern for liberty, should demand that this sort of thing be shut down.
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