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Bruce Fleming, the professor of English whom the U.S. Naval Academy was ordered to reinstate this summer, is back on campus but isn’t teaching, the Associated Press reported. Fleming says he was terminated because he’s been critical of military academy training, saying that future officers aren't being encouraged to think outside the box. In 2017, for example, he wrote in a Federalist op-ed that academy students are “cast members in a military Disneyland run for the benefit of the brass and the tourists, not the taxpayers who pay their way and want better-than-average officers.”
The academy has said that it fired Fleming because he was often inappropriate in class, such as by sending students a photo of himself in a Speedo (Fleming said that had to do with teaching poetry). Fleming’s duties “will not include teaching or advising midshipmen, as his presence in the classroom and engaging with midshipmen in any advisory role would be an undue disruption to the academic environment,” an academy spokesperson said. The academy is appealing the administrative law judge’s decision mandating that it reinstate Fleming.
