HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “I know that might sound somewhat esoteric to other people, but I’m an intellectual, so that’s what I intended.”

Halnon started shouting in the middle of a 2 1/2-hour flight from Managua, Nicaragua, to Miami, Fla., on Saturday, the Miami New Times reported.

One passenger filmed the impromptu lecture on a phone.

“My great hero, Hugo Chavez, nationalized the oil supply so that the people would own the oil,” she shouts. “Not ExxonMobil. Tell ExxonMobil to go away.”

Another video from the same passenger shows Halnon lighting a cigarette in her seat and taking a few puffs, which is not allowed on airlines.

Halnon told the Daily News her illegal light was meant to be “a symbol for a smoking gun,” and also a way to show her affinity with tobacco-loving “revolutionaries” like Fidel Castro. . . .

Halnon has been teaching sociology at Penn State-Abington since 1999, according to her biography on the college’s website. She previously taught at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

Her list of academic interests in her biography include “Central or Latin American studies,” “stigma,” “Women and madness,” “marijuana” and “Marxist theory.”

Fruits of the poisonous tree.