David Hoppe

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:: A 21 st century Catch-22

Affirmative action at IUPUI

By David Hoppe

Keith John Sampson never thought he could get in trouble for reading a book, let alone on a college campus, but that's what happened. Sampson is a man in his early fifties. He does janitorial work for the campus facility services at IUPUI, where he's been gradually accumulating the credits for a degree in Communications Studies - he has ten credit hours to go.

"Being on that campus has really been an experience for me," Sampson told me not long ago. It's an experience that got a lot more complicated last year.

Sampson is 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. Last year, Sampson was working in IUPUI's Medical Science building. It turns out the break room there is across from the morgue, which, as Sampson pointed out to me, is kind of ironic when you stop to think about it.

At the time, Sampson was reading a book he had checked out from the public library. That book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan , features a slightly grainy black and white photograph of the University of Notre Dame's famous golden dome on the cover. Its author is Todd Tucker, a professional writer and Notre Dame grad; the publisher is Loyola Press of Loyola University in Chicago.

The book is about how for two days in May 1924, a group of Notre Dame students got into a street fight with members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was meeting in South Bend for the express purpose of attacking Catholicism and sticking a collective thumb in the eye of the country's most famous Catholic university. The book was a Notre Dame Magazine "Pick of the Week" and garnered an average customer review of 4.5 stars on Amazon.com. In its review, The Indiana Magazine of History noted that Tucker "succeeds in placing the event in a broad framework that includes the origins and development of both the Klan and Notre Dame."

Sampson recalls that his AFSCME shop steward noticed him reading him the book once and told him that reading a book about the Klan was like bringing pornography to work. He wasn't interested in hearing what the book was actually about. Another time, a co-worker who was sitting across the table from Sampson in the break room commented that she found the Klan offensive. Sampson says that when he tried to explain the book, she said she wasn't interested in talking about it, either.

A few weeks passed. Then Sampson got a message ordering him to report to Marguerite Watkins at the IUPUI Affirmative Action Office. He was told a co-worker had filed a racial harassment complaint against him for reading Notre Dame vs. the Klan . Sampson says he tried to explain to Ms. Watkins that he had gotten the book from the public library, that it was a story about how students stood up to the Klan. He says he tried to show her the book, but that Ms. Watkins had no interest in seeing it.

Then Sampson received a letter, dated Nov. 25, 2007, from Lillian Charleston of IUPUI's Affirmative Action Office. The letter begins by saying that the AAO has completed its investigation of a co-worker's allegation that Sampson "racially harassed her by repeatedly reading the book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker in the presence of Black employees." It goes on to say, "you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers 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 co-workers." Charleston went on to say that according to "the legal 'reasonable person standard,' a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African Americans."

Sampson was ordered to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of his co-workers and, when reading the book, to sit apart from them.

"I feel like I've been caught up in a 21 st century version of Catch-22," says Sampson, who has never been given the opportunity to officially face any of his accusers, let alone try to tell them that Notre Dame vs. the Klan isn't even about African Americans. When I tried calling the Affirmative Action Office, I was told their policy was to never speak to the media.

But, says Sampson, this episode could be an opportunity. He would welcome the chance to participate in a moderated forum that might use his experience as an entry-point for a larger discussion dealing with intellectual freedom on the IUPUI campus.

That's a good idea. For Sampson's sake, I hope ideas still count at IUPUI.