The Stanford University "incident," notes FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — reminds the free-speech publication of a 2008 Indiana-Purdue Universities occurrence in which campus administrators charged a janitorial employee with racial harassment "for reading a book about defeating — defeating — the Ku Klux Klan." Merely the mention of the KKK, his coworkers grumbled, was intolerably offensive. And so the campus' vastly overpaid, infinitely witless administrators commanded the book-reading employee to cease learning during his breaks.
On to Stanford, last Friday. It was then that a student snapped a photo of another student reading Mein Kampf. The picture "circulated on campus" — and all hell broke loose. Two campus rabbis emailed the university's Jewish students, seeking "a process of reckoning and sincere repair." The student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, then reported that selfsame witless administrators were working "swiftly" with the two students to "address" the horror of independent reading.
In their email, the rabbis, Jessica Kirschner and Laurie Tapper, opined that "It can be upsetting to hear about incidents like this. Jewish people belong at Stanford, and deserve to be respected by our peers." Added The Stanford Daily: "The filing of the report follows a string of challenges Stanford’s Jewish student community has faced during this academic year."
Unmentioned by the Daily was the superior challenge faced by at least one student in trying to read a book, which, by the way, as FIRE also notes, has been required reading in a Stanford humanities class and sits in the university's library.
Why was the student reading Mein Kampf? That's the sort of question a Gestapo agent would have asked a German citizen "caught" reading an American tome on the evils of Naziism. In the United States, non-incumbent on citizens are explanations of their reading habits. In 1960, when D.H. Lawrence's 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover was finally published in the liberated states, many an American read it only in search of its shocking f word. Whatever the philistinism involved, that was nevertheless the reader's business — and no one else's.
What might Stanford administrators next need to "swiftly address"? Perhaps some literate student on a fine spring day will recline on the campus quad to read Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Oh how the snapshots will ensue, for feminist critics have long despised and denounced the novel, whose moral is that of a wantonly adulterous, spendthrift wife whose iniquities bring her and her husband to ruin. Of such samizdat reading at an institution of ever-lower education, university administrators — who would have made superb Gestapo agents — must be alerted.
The Mein Kampf-reading "incident" was reported via Stanford's Protected Identity Harm system, a modern-day Inquisition chamber that investigates "conduct ... that adversely and unfairly targets an individual or group," whereupon clueless university muck-a-mucks "provide a path to resolution for the affected individuals or communities who need to heal," principally through a "menu" of Northern California-Madmen exercises such as "mediated conversations, restorative justice sessions, or Indigenous circle practices."
Sort of takes your breath away, does it not? So much gibberish in a postmodern age — in which, theoretically and insistent in practice, critical and cultural "standards" are out. Here, however, even though they're "in," the university's Torquemadas have characteristically misidentified the "unfairly targeted individual."
God save us and all college students from do-gooders — who routinely do so much harm.