YOU CAN'T READ THAT HERE. THIS IS A UNIVERSITY.

Remember the story of the campus custodian at Ooey Pooey who got hauled into Lubyanka for reading a book?  "Charles Bantz, chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, apologized to Keith John Sampson in a letter dated Friday, saying the school is committed to free expression."  You'd think that would go without saying, but not in today's weird world of hidden cisheteropatriarchy everywhere.

Sampson, a 58-year-old white janitor and student majoring in communication studies, said he tried to explain that the book was a historical account.

"I have an interest in American history," Sampson said. "I was trying to educate myself."

But Sampson says his union official likened the book to bringing pornography to work, and the school's affirmative action officer in November told Sampson his conduct constituted racial harassment.

"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," Lillian Charleston wrote in a letter to Sampson.

Civil liberties groups and bloggers who took up his cause said Sampson had been wrongly cited for reading a book that is carried by the school's library.

"I am sure you see the absurdity of a university threatening an employee with discipline for reading a scholarly work that deals with the efforts of Notre Dame students in the 1920s to fight the KKK," American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana attorney Ken Falk said in a letter to a university lawyer.

I mean, when even the American Civil Liberties Union sees the foolishness of Ooey Poey's Diversity Weenies.  But because this lesson was taught in 2008, and Ooey Pooey is an urban comprehensive, the rage mob at Stanford probably thought the statute of limitations had run out, or that they could have standards.

Reading a book on a college campus should not prompt formal administrative intervention. But that’s what’s reportedly happening at Stanford University this week, after a photo of a student reading Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” circulated on campus last Friday.

The Stanford Daily said over the weekend that administrators were working “swiftly” with the students involved to “address” the incident. Two campus rabbis emailed Jewish students saying administrators “are in ongoing conversation with the individuals involved, who are committed to and actively engaged in a process of reckoning and sincere repair.”

Stanford was reportedly alerted to the book-reading via its Protected Identity Harm reporting system. Effectively a bias response system, Stanford says PIH reports help the university “address incidents where a community member experiences harm because of who they are and how they show up in the world.”

If you're put off by somebody reading a book, which is an activity long associated with attending a university, maybe you're not college material.  The money I sent to The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression at Christmas is being well-spent.

Because college students should not have to report to university authorities for merely reading a book — one, by the way, that has been required reading in at least one recent Stanford humanities class and is available to borrow from the university library — FIRE asked Stanford today to provide additional clarity about the way it handles these kinds of “harm” reports on campus.

We have recently seen that the threat of a Foundation lawsuit concentrates minds in the central administration. So let it be with Stanford.  "Stanford’s PIH system can be used, as here, to target and reform views students or administrators dislike, while cloaking it as a purely educational exercise."  We should have further developments from this investigation this week.