Posted on 10/29/2011 5:24:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
Julio Pino is a genocidal anti-Semite who uses his university email account to boast of sodomizing the mothers of his political opponents. But he has the protection of tenure. And he also has the protection of a cowardly administration, which fails to sufficiently condemn the behavior of a man who is probably too effeminate to act on his threats of violence and intimidation.
Pino, the unhinged Kent State University history professor, recently shouted "Death to Israel" during a speech by a former Israeli diplomat. The university’s president, Lester Lefton, now says that statementwas “deplorable.” Lefton issued a statement saying Julio Pino had a right to shout "Death to Israel” and disrupt someone else’s speech. That’s good to know because I plan to barge into Julio Pino’s history class next week and shout “Death to Julio Pino!” If the president doesn’t write a letter supporting my right to do so, I plan to barge into his office and shout “Death to President Lefton!”
I can do all this because we all know that shouting other people down and drowning out their protected free speech with threats of violence is also protected free speech. It’s what the Founding Fathers intended. Death to Jefferson! Death to Madison! Kill them all!
President Lefton surprised me when he wrote "We value critical thinking at this university and encourage students to engage with ideas that they find difficult or make them uncomfortable.” Well that’s just great! That must mean that Kent State has no university speech code. And that means we can engage in a little experimentation.
First, I say we go the Kent State diversity center and shout “Death to Africa!” and “Death to San Francisco!” If we have time after lunch, then we can go to the Kent State Women’s Center and shout “Death to Feminism!” If the point is lost on them, then we can ask a more serious question: Why have you not condemned Julio Pino for claiming – with his university email address - that he forcibly sodomized a woman who is a senior citizen?
For the record, President Lefton (see http://www.kent.edu/president/index.cfm), said this about Julio Pino’s most recent outburst: "We hope that our faculty will always model how best to combine passion for one's position with respect for those with whom we disagree. Calling for the destruction of the state from which our guest comes (as do some of our students, faculty and community members) is a grotesque failure to model these values."
Note that Lefton was talking about the “Death to Israel” remarks. Pino’s claims that he forcibly sodomized a senior citizen have yet to be condemned. Kent State officials are still trying to determine whether Pino’s email account was hacked as he claims. By the way, the investigation seems to have been lingering for about 18 months with no conclusion. Maybe that means Pino’s computer wasn’t hacked. Maybe he’s just a sociopath. Maybe Kent State University is just a den of spineless cowards.
The irony of the entire “Death to Israel” episode is that it came after Pino asked the Israeli speaker how he and his government could justify providing aid to countries with “blood money” he says came from the deaths of Palestinian children and babies. The speaker tried to move on after the absurd question. Pino started shouting and then left. He left many wondering “Was this the same Julio Pino who wrote an editorial to the Kent State student newspaper urging Palestinian children to strap bombs to their bodies to kill innocent Jews?” Okay, it really wasn’t irony. It was just blatant hypocrisy from a self-righteous racist.
Pino did not respond last Wednesday when I wrote to him about the “Death to Israel” incident. Maybe someone hacked his email account. Or maybe he was just out forcibly sodomizing a senior citizen. Sounds about right, since there’s no evidence his email has even been hacked.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently noted that Julio Pino was also caught up in a controversy in 2007 when he was cited on websites as being linked to an extremist Islamic website that espoused jihad and published bomb-making instructions. The Plain Dealer notes that “Kent State officials at the time said the extremist site had no connection to Pino or to the university.”
What the Plain Dealer does not note is that Pino and his former department chair have since admitted his connection to the terrorist website. Add the Plain Dealer to the list of cowards protecting a tenured terrorist who sucks the blood of the over-burdened taxpayer.
End tenure.
There’s an idea whose time has arrived.
Simple, and bears repeating. End tenure.
It’s bad enough that a dog like this is funded by taxpayers, and protected by tenure policy.
But equally bad is that he holds students mentally hostage and, using the power to grade them, molds them into little liberal robots.
Mind-numbed liberal student-robots, arise and reclaim your power to think.
Excellent point, and the sooner the better
long overdue.
tenure was demanded by communists in the 1950s to protect themselves.
it was expanded by the new left boomer and successive generations into high salaries,
and less work. since the 90’s faculty have reduced teaching loads by 1/3.
Tenure ended in the private sector decades ago when corporations began downsizing, first to get rid of the dead wood and later to move out expensive middle aged workers to be replaced with young workers or outsourced. The retire at 65 with a watch and a pension corporate career was pretty much gone by 1995. Government workers are now beginning to experience the same adjustments as revenue strapped states and communities. Deal with economic reality. Soon academics will receive the same treatment. Already there are universities that don’t have tenure.
This turkey just happens to be at Kent State, but there are hundreds like him in our University system.
How about the Professors at Duke whowanted to hang 3 innocent boys for an act they did not commit. What has happened to them? Nothing.
Berkely is filled with these slavering left leaning educated imbeciles as are many other colleges.
It would seem the best way to turn American youth into Socialists and Communists is to send them to get a college education. Is it any wonder our High School and other schools are filled with Socialists? They are just repeating what they have been taught by these educated brain washers.
“Maybe Kent State University is just a den of spineless cowards.” - Bingo! Their mascot is jelly.
Now the fashionable left has replaced the Latin church as the source of "settled" doctrine (including "settled science"). If you abolish tenure, it will not be the creeps and nitwits like Julio Pino who are removed from their posts, but members of FIRE, conservative historians like Alan Kors at Penn, science faculty who grew up under Communism and have the temerity to object to Communist-style nonsense when they see it, climatologists whose work challenges AGW 'orthodoxy', business and economics professors who give an honest account of the financial crisis, laying the blame where it belongs, on government, faculty who dare to share their Christian faith with students. . . In short all the sort of people FReepers want more of in academe.
This guy is legion at our country’s public and private universities. Let’s face it, these people are, with few exceptions, mediocre minds and mediocre scholars. Like his “colleague” at the University of Colorado, Ward Churchill, the only way they can get any recognition from the society at large is by their moronic and outrageous public statements. Otherwise they are nonentities on the public payroll, accountable to no one, working their 20-hour weeks for inflated salaries (college loan debt, anyone?) and basking in the admiration of equally moronic undergraduates. Big, deformed frogs in a very small pond, with no relevance to the rest of society. Nothing else they publish or say is worth mention, let alone worth noting. I think the Kent State president inadvertently hit on the problem when he mentioned “critical thinking.” It is the abysmal absence of such that is at the root of this situation. I doubt he meant to call attention to that fact and I am confident he wouldn’t recognize it if he met it on the street.
TAX TENURE AND TAX IT HEAVILY!!
>>>Anyone calling for the abolition of tenure at universities is not a conservative, or at least not a clear-thinking conservative. Tenure is one of the “boundary markers of our forefathers”. It is the guardian of the first freedom of expression that ever existed in Western civilization: academic freedom. When speculating about matters the Latin church regarded as settled anywhere else could get you imprisoned or worse, within the confines of the university, there was freedom of inquiry. And tenure was the protector of that freedom.<<<
I’m a teacher at a high school in Alaska. I appreciate your overview of tenure’s history. You are correct when you state that the rationale for tenure is protection of controversial speech and teachings in academia.
I’m still in favor of abolishing tenure, though. What you’re calling freedom of inquiry is already protected in the First Amendment. No one prevents Alan Kors from publishing a book or making a speech. We challenge the orthodoxy of global warming every day here without retribution. Learning and teaching aren’t restricted to the classroom.
I would share horror stories of the way in which tenure distorts schools, from retaining incompetents who gets paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for doing very little because they can’t be fired to the ideologically leftists who use the classroom as their platform. I don’t have all day, though. We already see parents responding to the left’s takeover of education through the large numbers who homeschool. From someone on the inside, your concern for protection of diverse thinking inside academia is already moot; ideological concerns are prominent in the interview process (in many places), so conservative voices aren’t even let in the door. I interviewed once throughout California, and let me tell you that the process is skewed toward selection of like-minded people.
Given a choice, I’d like to see complete privatization of education, but that won’t happen within my lifetime. There are places such as my community in Alaska that has your mix of viewpoints; in fact, most of my colleagues would called themselves “conservative” or “pro-American.” We can choose not to send our kids to the radical left colleges and universities. We can use alternative means to educate. We can diminish the message from those leftist enclaves with humor and serious research.
As far as I go personally, I became a teacher at the age of 42, and it is still startling to think that I can’t be fired. I’ve been fired at other jobs. It straightened me out. Getting fired for voicing your opinion happens sometimes in the world outside school. It is not the end of things, nor is it the end of the opinion.
IMHO
Wow. Marking for later
Thanks Kaslin.
Ah, but schools are a different thing than universities. I see no argument for tenure at institutions where the faculty’s only duties are teaching (and student advising and assisting in administration). It is at colleges and universities where the normative duties of the faculty include research and scholarship (or, here I’ll make a concession to the arts, the production of art) that tenure is part of the organic heritage of Western civilization and necessary to the proper function of the university, as a university. Its extension to K-12 schools or to non-research teaching hospitals, or to anywhere where its purpose — the protection of unpopular scholarship, with ‘unpopular among colleagues’ being at least as important as ‘unpopular with the general public’ — no longer exists because scholarship is not part of the faculty’s duties, makes no sense.
The question is not whether Kors or another conservative is prevented from making a speech, but whether he in history, or Lindzen or Choi in climatology, or the odd cultural anthropologist who has accepted the physical anthropologists’ evidence that the sort of cannibals who hunted other human beings really existed and thereby offended his colleagues who insist that that sort of cannibalism is always a specious accusation one people makes against another, or the orientalist who writes an honest paper discussing some aspect of the conception of jihad, which is taken as politically incorrect by the apologists of Islam, or the theoretical physicist who has concluded that string theory is a crock, or. . . . will be able to continue as scholars and professors, or whether they’ll be bounced out of the university and obliged to become cab drivers by the latter day campus analogs of Ortsgruppenleiters, Commissars or Inquisitors.
Like freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, academic freedom only works when it protects both the good and the bad, and thus tenure (which in universities is not granted on the basis of mere seniority as it seems to be in K-12 schools, but on a combination of seniority and scholarly attainment, and, typically, some measure of competence in teaching, unless the scholarly attainment is stellar) must end up protecting some bad apples as well as good.
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