A professor at the U.S. Naval Academy has accused it of retaliating against him in a 15-month-old dispute that began when he told his classes that the academy’s sexual-assault training was unfair to men, The Washington Post reports.
Bruce E. Fleming, who has vocally criticized the academy on a range of issues, including in essays in The Chronicle Review, last year sent emails to two students who had objected to his criticisms of the training. “There is no assertion that is too sacred for me to question it,” he wrote.
The students filed a harassment complaint against Mr. Fleming, an English professor, who was eventually cleared. He, in turn, sought to have the students punished under the academy’s conduct code. That pursuit ended with a formal reprimand against the professor for retaliating against the students. Mr. Fleming, who says the academy is trying to silence him, is fighting the reprimand.
Over the 27 years Bruce Fleming has spent teaching future naval officers to craft sentences and to scrutinize modern verse, the bow-tied English professor also has assumed the role of the U.S. Naval Academy’s most outspoken and tireless critic. In interviews with national news organizations, he has derided the school’s admission practices, its prohibition against hand-holding, even its very existence.
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