Newsletter

April 2008

Affirmative Action At IUPUI (Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis)

David Hoppe

Keith John Sampson never thought he could get in trouble for reading a book,
especially not on a college campus.

But
that’s what happened. Sampson is a man in his early 50s. He does janitorial work
for the campus facility services at IUPUI, where he’s been gradually
accumulating credits for a degree in communications studies. He has 10 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, 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.
Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan,
published in 2004, features a photograph of the University of Notre Dame’s
famous golden dome on the cover. Its author is Todd Tucker, 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 sticking a collective thumb in the eye of
the country’s most famous Catholic university. Notre Dame vs. the Klan
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 told him that reading a book
about the Klan was like bringing pornography to work. The shop steward wasn’t
interested in hearing what the book was actually about. Another time, a coworker
who was sitting across the table from Sampson in the break room commented that
she found the Klan offensive. Sampson says he tried to tell her about the book,
but she wasn’t interested in talking about it.

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
coworker had filed a racial harassment complaint against him for reading
Notre Dame vs. the Klan in the break room. Sampson says he tried to explain
to Watkins what the book was about. He says he tried to show her the book, but
that Watkins showed no interest in seeing it.

Then Sampson received a letter, dated Nov. 25, 2007, from Lillian Charleston,
also of IUPUI’s Affirmative Action Office. The letter begins by saying that the
AAO has completed its investigation of a coworker’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 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.” 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
coworkers and, when reading the book, to sit apart from them.

“I
feel like I’ve been caught up in a 21st century version of catch-22,” says
Sampson, who has never been given the opportunity to officially face any of his
accusers. When I tried calling the Affirmative Action Office, I was told their
policy is to never speak to the media.

But, Sampson says, this episode could be an opportunity. He would welcome the
chance to participate in a moderated forum that might use his experience 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.

Editors note: At press time we learned that Sampson
received another letter from IUPUI’s Affirmative Action Office, postmarked Feb.
21. We will continue to follow this story.

February 27, 2008, www.nuvo.net/articles/21st-century-catch22/.