One recent eventful flight may just confirm all the conservative stereotypes of sociology professors:
“The United States has declared war on Venezuela!” a woman aboard a plane says repeatedly in the video.
The Miami New Times identified the woman as 52-year-old Karen Halnon, an associate professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University-Abington…
“In a democracy one must speak up and against injustice,” Halnon said in an e-mail to The Post on Tuesday after saying in another email that she was mistreated during her arrest. “To be tortured is not democracy!”…
According to “Inside Edition,” Halnon said she was not intoxicated. “Anyone who is speaking out for social justice, it is the usual situation that most people will think they’re crazy,” she said, according to the show’s news release…
The release noted that Halnon said she lit a cigarette on the plane “to show solidarity with her idol, Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro.”
Airplanes are not the best places to light up and loudly espouse political views. (I do wonder, however, if certain topics might be viewed more favorably by other passengers. What if the airline service was bad and a passenger got up to deliver a populist rant?) Here we have a sociology professor who wants to be deviant (political views, smoking, rant on a plane) in order to promote social justice as well as defend left-wing or Marxist regimes. According to conservatives, isn’t this what all sociology professors do or would secretly like to do?
This is one of those times that it would be interesting to gather a large group of sociologists to see how they would respond…