Oh (big) brother!

A UMass-Dartmouth undergrad was visited by Federal Agents after he ordered a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book via the college’s interlibrary loan service. According to the agents, the visit was triggered because the book was on a “watch list.” I would love, love, love to see what other books the government is monitoring. Agents brought the book when they visited the student, but they did not leave it with him.

He needed it for a paper for a history class on fascism and totalitarianism. Irony, anyone?

What’s also disturbing is that a second UM-D history professor, Brian Glyn Williams, was considering not teaching a course about terrorism, since it might subject his students to this sort of federal scrutiny:

Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored.
“My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think,” he said.
Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.
“I shudder to think of all the students I’ve had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that,” he said. “Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless.”

When I was in high school, little revolutionary me went to the local college library to get a copy of the Little Red Book, among other resources, for a paper about Mao. Since the government did not intercept the book, I was able to learn that while Mao had some great ideas, he also had some terrible ones, and subjected a lot of people to a lot of trauma. I am glad I was left alone to read about that for myself.

More on the story above here, from Inside Higher Ed.

And then, an update on the story from the South Coast Today, which broke the story and the subsequent “it’s a hoax” story. Yeah, it’s a hoax. As Williams says in the follow-up piece, “it’s safe to do research” again. Let’s all go and order us a copy of the 1965 Little Red Book from Interlibrary Loan, eh? Thanks to Bicyclemark for pointing out the new developments.