> Dennis wrote:

>> ANGERING COMMENTARY FROM WSJ
>>
>> HEAD: American Politics Aren't 'Post-Racial'
>>
>>
>> The not-quite-concluded racial drama playing out at Indiana
>> University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) in the last months
>> can't be ranked with the embittering rape charge scandal at Duke that so
>> recently mesmerized the nation. And as news it's not in the same league
>> as the total war waged against Harvard president Lawrence Summers for
>> having had the temerity to suggest that factors in addition to prejudice
>> might have something to do with the underrepresentation of women in math
>> and the sciences.
>>
>> Still, what happened at IUPUI is a pungent reminder of all that's
>> possible now in the rarefied ideological atmosphere on our college
>> campuses - and in this presidential election year, not perhaps only on
>> our campuses.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> That was in November. Months later, in February of this year, Mr. Sampson
>> received - from the same source - a letter with an astonishingly
>> transformed version of his offense. And there could be no mystery as to
>> the cause of this change.
>>
>> After the official judgment against him, Mr. Sampson turned to the
>> Indiana state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose office
>> contacted university attorneys. Worse, the case got some sharp local
>> press coverage that threatened to get wider.
>>
>> Ludicrous harassment cases are not rare at our institutions of higher
>> learning. But there was undeniably something special - something pure,
>> and glorious - in the clarity of this picture. A university had brought a
>> case against a student on grounds of a book he had been reading.
>>
>> And so the new letter to Mr. Sampson by affirmative action officer
>> Charleston brought word that she wished to clarify her previous letter,
>> and to say it was "permissible for him to read scholarly books or other
>> materials on break time." About the essential and only theme of the first
>> letter - the "racially abhorrent" subject of the book - or the warnings
>> that any "future substantiated conduct of a similar nature could mean
>> serious disciplinary action" - there was not a word. She had meant in
>> that first letter, she said, only to address "conduct" that caused
>> concern among his co-workers.
>>
>> What that conduct was, the affirmative action officer did not reveal -
>> but she had delivered the message rewriting the history of the case.
>> Absolutely and for certain there had been no problem about any book he
>> had been reading.
>>
>> This, indeed, was now the official story - as any journalist asking about
>> the case would learn instantly from the university's media relations
>> representatives. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved - if not
>> much - by the extraordinary efforts of these tormented agents trying to
>> explain that the first letter was all wrong: No reading of any book had
>> anything to do with the charges against Mr. Sampson. This means, I asked
>> one, that Mr. Sampson could have been reading about the adventures of
>> Jack and Jill and he still would have been charged? Yes. What, then, was
>> the offense? "Harassing behavior." While reading the book? The question
>> led to careful explanations hopeless in tone - for good reason - and well
>> removed from all semblance of reason. What the behavior was, one learned,
>> could never be revealed.
>>
>> There was, of course, no other offensive behavior; had there been any it
>> would surely have appeared in the first letter's gusher of accusation.
>> Like those prosecutors who invent new charges when the first ones fail in
>> court, the administrators threw in the mysterious harassment count. Such
>> were the operations of the university's guardians of equity and justice.
>>
>> In April - having been pressed by the potent national watchdog group FIRE
>> (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) as well as the ACLU -
>> University Chancellor Charles R. Bantz finally sent them a letter
>> expressing regret over this affair, and testifying to his profound
>> commitment to freedom of expression. So far as can be ascertained, the
>> university has extended no such expressions of regret to Keith Sampson.
>>
>> This case and all its kind are worth bearing in mind for anyone pondering
>> the hypersensitivity surrounding the issue of race today. The mindset
>> that produces those harassment courts, those super-heated capacities for
>> perceiving insult, is not limited to college campuses.
>>
>> Its presence is evident in this election campaign, which has seen more
>> than a touch of readiness to impute some form of racism to all tough
>> criticisms of Barack Obama. The deranged response that greeted Bill
>> Clinton's remark that certain of Sen. Obama's claims were "a fairy tale,"
>> told the story. No need to go into the now famous catalogue of
>> accusations about the Clintons' "sly racist" tactics.
>>
>> There will be much more ahead, directed to the Republicans and their
>> candidate. Some more, no doubt, about the Willie Horton ad of 1988, whose
>> status as a quintessential piece of racism is - except for a few rare
>> voices of reason - accepted throughout our media as revealed truth. To be
>> sure, the Willie Horton charge has for some time been overshadowed by
>> ominous predictions of all the Swiftboating Republicans are supposed to
>> be readying.
>>
>> And Mr. Obama himself, the candidate of racial transcendence, has now
>> taken a plunge of sorts to old-style race politics. In a pre-emptive
>> dismissal of future criticism, he warned a Florida audience on June 20 of
>> the racist tactics the Republicans planned. "We know the strategy," he
>> said. Republicans planned to make people afraid of him. They'd say "he's
>> got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"
>>
>> All this may be far from the world of the universities. But to those
>> aforementioned campus ideologues, the thinking is familiar.
>> **********
>> We see it in these NG's when the silly cry of racism is "haacked" like
>> some "louie" by some of our less sophisticated correspondents for the
>> mere repeating of one black newspaper columnist's appellation for Obama,
>> i.e., Barack, The Magic Negro. The orange fright wig-wearing red noses
>> here should go back and re-read this cautionary tale...and reflect on
>> their inevitable regretting on what they wished for.

> Well you know, colleges are obsolete. A truly liberated mind would not
> bother spending time or money on them.