Via Instapundit comes the unsurprising news that the UMass student who claimed he was interrogated by Homeland Security officers after ordering a copy of Mao's Little Red Book through interlibrary loan was making the whole thing up.

According to the Boston Globe, the professor who originally fed the media the lies the student, who remains nameless, told him confronted the student when questions were raised about the veracity of the story. According to this professor, the student then confessed to lying. A UMass administrator says the university plans to take no action against the student, since the exchange "took place between a student and his faculty members." The trouble now is that as long as the student who allegedly told two of his professors his incredible tale of homeland absurdity remains unnamed and unidentified, so thoroughly underground that no journalist has spoken to him and so thoroughly shielded that the university is not even planning to have a chat with him about academic honesty, it begins to look like there may be no student at all. Cynics will wonder exactly who committed the hoax and will ask why UMass administrators aren't pursuing an issue that has more than a few loose ends hanging from it.

At the very least, UMass administrators might want to take steps to ensure that professors aren't so gullible in the future. The commenters at InsideHigherEd.com could tell right away that this case smelled wrong. Why couldn't the student's professors?

UPDATE 12/28/05: InsideHigherEd.com has pulled its initial article and replaced it with a full update. The new article contains a link to a PDF of the original.

The South Coast Times story this morning clearly says that a reporter was present at the confrontation when the student confessed.

I'm not sure that much can be made of this story and the faculty involved, at this point, except that we should be cautious when students tell tales, whether it's about the computer eating the paper, a grandparent's death, wild-eyed radically (insert ideology here) professors, or Homeland Security.

Some of the commenters at InsideHigherEd were sucked in, though. One gets the impression that they were enjoying their own little moment of totalitarian oppression, at least vicariously. Ted Kennedy was sucked in too: On wiretapping, Bush isn't listening to the Constitution. Kennedy's other points would be more compelling, i.e. the reader would have some feeling of confidence that he might know what he's talking about, if he weren't mentioning "Mao Tse-tung's Communist Manifesto" in the article.

Oh, I think that there is quite a bit to be made of this, Sherman. The gullibility of two professors and their haste to publicize a story that smelled to high heaven during the debate over the renewal of the Patriot Act calls into question their professionalism and warrants a reprimand, at the very least.

It wasn't just the admininistrators who were gullible, Captain's Quarters blog had a post about the Sacramento Bee being taken in by it days after the nature of the hoax was all over the blogosphere . Sure is a good thing they have all those fact checkers at the MSM.