A tale of utterly moronic repression of intellectual freedom at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis is getting around, thanks to Nuvo, an Indianapolis newspaper.

Keith John Sampson, a janitor at IUPUI, landed in big trouble last year with the campus’s apparently zealous Affirmative Action Office. He’s been slapped down for reading a book critical of the Ku Klux Klan while on a work break. A black co-worker of Sampson, who saw him reading the book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan, filed a racial harassment grievance against him, after reportedly telling him that reading a work about the Klan was akin to (in Nuvo’s words) “bringing pornography to work.” The AAO, ignoring Sampson’s efforts to describe the content of the book, proceeded to brand him as “insensitive” and to order him to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of his co-workers.

Sampson now welcomes the chance to speak publicly in the interest of intellectual liberty about what he calls his “catch-22″ ordeal. The IUPUI leadership should discipline its AAO and see that all parties who so ignorantly and reflexively wronged Sampson apologize.