For reading a book AGAINST the Ku Klux Klan.
The place: Indiana University- Purdue University, Indianapolis.
Keith John Sampson does janitorial work for the campus facility services at IUPUI, where he's been gradually accumulating credits for a degree in communications studies. As an avid reader. It's been his habit to bring books to work with him, so that he can read in the break room when he's not on the clock. While working at the IUPUI's Medical Science building Sampson was reading a book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fight Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. The book, a scholarly study published by Loyola Press of Loyola University-Chicago, is a narrative history of a little remembered confrontation back in 1924 between Klan members, who'd come to the Notre Dame campus to insult and taunt Catholics, and the Catholic students at the school. It recounts how the Notre Dame students beat back the Klan, who subsequently left town after a series of street fights.
But, context be damned, the book had the words Ku Klux Klan in the title and thus happened to offend an employee who told the shop steward. Sampson's name was then turned over to the University's Affirmative Action Office, which (doubtless without even looking at, much less reading the book, charged him with racial harassment and insensitivity, saying ""You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence ... you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers." Sampson, under threat of disciplinary action by the university, was ordered to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of his coworkers and, when reading the book, to sit apart from them.
(Thanks to Legal Satyricon)
Also to Classically Liberal
The place: Indiana University- Purdue University, Indianapolis.
Keith John Sampson does janitorial work for the campus facility services at IUPUI, where he's been gradually accumulating credits for a degree in communications studies. As an avid reader. It's been his habit to bring books to work with him, so that he can read in the break room when he's not on the clock. While working at the IUPUI's Medical Science building Sampson was reading a book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fight Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. The book, a scholarly study published by Loyola Press of Loyola University-Chicago, is a narrative history of a little remembered confrontation back in 1924 between Klan members, who'd come to the Notre Dame campus to insult and taunt Catholics, and the Catholic students at the school. It recounts how the Notre Dame students beat back the Klan, who subsequently left town after a series of street fights.
But, context be damned, the book had the words Ku Klux Klan in the title and thus happened to offend an employee who told the shop steward. Sampson's name was then turned over to the University's Affirmative Action Office, which (doubtless without even looking at, much less reading the book, charged him with racial harassment and insensitivity, saying ""You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence ... you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers." Sampson, under threat of disciplinary action by the university, was ordered to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of his coworkers and, when reading the book, to sit apart from them.
(Thanks to Legal Satyricon)
Also to Classically Liberal
Leave a comment