Mungowitz drops the ball

Perhaps due to his Pisco intake, or his fear of being caught up in an similar situation in South America, my esteemed co-blogger really buried the lede yesterday in his short note about UNC professor Paul Frampton.

I rise this morning to revise and extend my colleague's remarks.

This January, Frampton was arrested in Buenos Aires for boarding a plane with a suitcase containing a fair amount of Bolivian marching powder. He claims innocence and I believe him because, judging by his statements in this article, his drug of choice is LSD (that is to say, homie be trippin').

First off, he appears to believe he is working somewhere other than where he is working:

“The university has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to help me,” he said. “You would expect a university of that caliber would do everything possible to get me out of prison.”

He also has a theory of why mighty UNC is not helping; the provost is too jealous to do his duty!

Carney had long been jealous, he said, because Frampton had earned tenure much more quickly and because Carney’s academic accomplishments were paltry compared to his own.


 “I am one of the most published physicists, and really he hasn’t done much that is of interest,” Frampton said, Carney had taken advantage of Frampton’s helpless position to stop his pay and hinder any notion of the university helping him.

The university has put him on a leave of absence and stopped paying him because he's not teaching his class.

 But Frampton says that this is unfair because the class was already being cancelled due to low enrollment (1 student signed up and 5 is the minimum class size)!

 Wow!

There is one part of the story that does make me thing Frampton may be guilty (remember he's been in jail since January 23rd:


Frampton said he was actually working more than 40 hours a week in prison, and had already written four scholarly papers this year.