‘He Was Just Babbling, Basically.’ Students Say Their Professor Spent Class Time Touting Conspiracy Theories.

Well, that didn’t take long. August isn’t even over and professorial behavior is already under scrutiny in the new academic year.

“The world is currently experiencing a dramatic covert war of biblical proportions,” intones the narrator of a video shown in a Mesa Community College classroom. He describes “literally the fight for Earth between the forces of good and evil.” But, he says, “it appears the good guys are winning.”

The video, titled “The Plan to Save the World,” was reportedly shown this month by Douglas J. Belmore in his fall-semester English composition class. It rallies support for the conspiracy theory QAnon, which holds, among other things, that an elite cabal engaging in child-sex trafficking has been trying to undermine Donald Trump’s election and presidency. It was apparently one of several conspiracy theories that Belmore shared.

Was this an exercise in rhetorical analysis there at Mesa’s Red Mountain Campus? Apparently not, according to an article in the Phoenix New Times by Steven Hsieh.

He found a course review from an earlier year that describes Belmore’s lectures as “20 percent actually learning English, 80 percent conspiracy theories and rants about his right-leaning views.” In addition to the video presentation, the article says, Belmore spent most of that hour talking about QAnon, opining that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his own death, and discussing collapsing media conglomerates, porn, and Satanism. “He was just babbling, basically,” a student told Hsieh.

“Approached in his classroom after the publication of this story, Belmore said: ‘I think I only have one response to give you. It’s a question and it’s three words. Who is Q?’”

When asked how QAnon was pertinent to English composition, Belmore simply repeated the response and said he’d tell campus security that the reporter had entered his class, Hsieh wrote.

A student who was in Belmore’s class that day confirmed Hsieh’s account. The student, who asked not to be identified, said the Tuesday class did not include any instruction in English composition. Belmore, the student said, didn’t even go over the syllabus.

The second class, on Thursday, was better, if not exactly inspiring, the student said. That day, Belmore focused mostly on punctuation, but every now and then still referenced QAnon matters, particularly sex trafficking, with which he seemed quite obsessed. He said he’d ask students to write some essays, and that he too would write essays and share them with the class.

“I can only imagine what those will be like,” the student said wryly.

When students introduced themselves and said what their possible life plans were, he referenced the QAnon video and asked them, “Will you be one of the good guys or one of the criminals?”

Despite the oddity of the classes, the student said, “He’s a really nice guy. He just, you know, doesn’t talk about English.”

Mesa Community College has “had some communication” with Belmore “but more needs to happen,” Jeffrey T. Andelora, interim dean of arts, humanities, and social sciences, told The Chronicle. The college hasn’t been able to corroborate what is described in the Phoenix New Times article, except for Hsieh’s entering the classroom this week and speaking with Belmore and students.

“Mesa Community College gives faculty wide latitude as to how they approach content as long as it relates to the course competencies,” said Andelora. If Belmore was discussing the political and cultural implications of the material he presented, “that could be entirely appropriate.” But whether he was or not “is a question that we do not yet have an answer to.”

Belmore, an adjunct faculty member, did not respond to voice-mail or email messages from The Chronicle.

An Academic-Freedom Issue?

Is academic freedom in peril here? After all, isn’t it the extreme case that tests the limits of one’s principles?

Not necessarily, said experts, because academic freedom may not be the relevant issue if someone is simply not doing the job he or she is assigned to do. They all emphasized that they were not familiar with details of Belmore’s situation and offered only general principles to be considered.

“Academic freedom is very broad,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, associate secretary of the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. But it doesn’t support “the view that any professor can simply say whatever they want. Faculty should not persistently intrude material that has no relation to the subject,” he said, regardless of whether that material is considered right wing or left wing. It’s important, said Tiede, that the administration involve the faculty in assessing what happened and in determining an appropriate response.

If the question was whether the professor had the right to espouse right-wing views, that would be a matter of academic freedom, said Adam B. Steinbaugh, director of the Individual Rights Defense Program of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But if the material is “unrelated to the class,” he said, it “doesn’t raise academic-freedom concerns because it doesn’t matter what the viewpoint is.”

Michael Bugeja, a professor and the former director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, said the spotlight tends to fall on professors in these situations. But it’s the department chair, he said, who has “an ethical obligation to ensure,” from student evaluations and other evidence, “that relevant discussion is occurring in the classroom.”

“People can disagree about how to teach a particular course,” said Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor, former law-school dean, and former provost at the University of Chicago who has written extensively about free speech and academic freedom. But if classroom presentations are simply off-the-wall and irrelevant, he said, “I don’t think the basic principles of academic freedom are going to have very much to do with that.”

As this gets sorted out, perhaps the only certainty is that summer is over and a new academic year will bring a steady drumbeat of classroom-speech controversies. Or, as the narrator puts it in “The Plan to Save the World,” “Fellow slaves, it’s time to buckle your seatbelt.”