Correction Appended

MADISON, Wis., July 26 — Sipping on a bottle of water and holding a book about the history and future of Islam, Kevin Barrett ticked off a few examples of what he saw as evidence that the Sept. 11 attacks had been an “inside job.”

As children zoomed by on tricycles and shot basketballs at a community center near his home, Mr. Barrett, 47, described how some news organizations (the French daily newspaper Figaro and Radio France International, in fact) had reported that an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency visited with Osama bin Laden two months before the attacks. He also said fires could not have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers at free-fall speed, as reported by the special Sept. 11 commission. “The 9/11 report will be universally reviled as a sham and a cover-up very soon,” said Mr. Barrett, who has been a teacher’s assistant or lecturer on Islam, African literature and other subjects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1996. “The 9/11 commission has its conspiracy theory, and we have ours.”

Mr. Barrett’s views, which he described on a conservative radio talk show in June, have outraged some Wisconsin legislators and generated a fierce debate about academic freedom on a campus long known as a haven for progressive ideologies and student activism.

“They apparently have no limits to what can be taught in the classroom,” Representative Steve Nass said of the university’s decision to allow Mr. Barrett to teach a class this fall titled “Islam: Religion and Culture.”