Me & Julio Down by the Schoolyard

Well, actually, I wasn’t down by the schoolyard, and neither was Julio, who’s been partying in the United Arab Emirates for the last couple of weeks.

Yes, Kent State’s Celebrity Prof, Julio Pino, is back in the news.
A truly bizarre turn of events. Dr. Pino, you will recall, is more famous as a supporter of radical Islam and contributor to Jihadi websites. But in this story, he’s more of a bystander, as his department chairman becomes collateral damage of Dr. Pino’s notoriety.

Sometime this fall, he approached the chairman of the Kent State History department and requested a 6 week leave to attend a conference on Arabic language and culture in the United Arab Emirates.

So far, so good. At least, once you get past the unsettling thought of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize a trip for someone of Pino’s confessed ideology to a part of the world were he’s most likely to meet up with folk even more radical than he is. I wonder what one wears to the farewell banquet– on such an auspicious occasion, are Kalashnikovs and suicide belts considered de rigueur?

On the plus side, KSU students get a six week break from Dr. Pino.

And now for the bizarre part – the chairman neglected to get proper approvals for the paid leave, and was “fired” as History Department Chairman as a result. Since Dr. Jameson has tenure, he’s not really fired, but I imagine that he’s going to be a bit cranky after being publicly treated this way. Further, he’s been banished to “a special assignment — full-time research on his specialties, environmental projects on the Texas-Mexico border or the Columbia River”.

Update: Mike Adams beat me to this title -- but only by about 9 months or so. Like most things in life, when you come up with something clever, somebody else has already done it.

My apologies to Prof. Adams.