People all across the internet are once again at each other’s throats over a minor incident that’s morphed into the latest fuel for the culture war. This time, it’s a controversy out of the University of Oklahoma, where a college student received a zero from a transgender instructor on an assignment in which she cited the Bible as evidence.
Then all hell broke loose.
It all started when the student, Samantha Fulnecky, was asked as part of a psychology class to read and respond to the academic article “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence.” (Unpaywalled text here.) The article reports empirical data and asserts that children who more closely conform to gender stereotypes (e.g., athletic boys or fashionable girls) are more popular and that those who don’t conform, such as tomboyish girls or feminine boys, face more bullying and harassment.
The assignment instructs students to submit a 650-word essay response that shows they read the academic article and engaged in critical thinking about its subject matter. Fulnecky submitted … something else.
In a roughly 250-word response, far short of the required length, she briefly mentions gender stereotypes and teasing among children — saying she doesn’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing — then proceeds to discuss her mostly unrelated religious perspectives through a series of assertions she doesn’t actually explain or support. For example:
“God made male and female and made us differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose.”
“Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth.”
“Pushing the lie that everyone has their own truth and everyone can do whatever they want and be whoever they want is not biblical whatsoever.”
Importantly, the assignment didn’t ask about transgenderism, demons, or what is or isn’t biblical. Even if it had, Fulnecky didn’t defend these positions in a way that could at least constitute critical thinking, even if off-topic critical thinking. She just asserts them and moves on. And it’s all written in a way that is rambling and borderline incoherent.
There’s no nice way to say it: The essay was absolutely terrible. And, using the rubric the instructor provided, it’s hard to see how any grade other than maybe a five, at most, could be given.
First, there is no clear tie back to the article. There’s nothing in Fulnecky’s essay that actually shows she read or understood the academic article, beyond maybe skimming the abstract, at all.
0/10.
Does her reaction discuss an aspect of the article? Maybe, if we’re being generous, we could give her a few points, at most five, for trying here because she does at least discuss some semi-related topics from the article, albeit without really addressing any of the empirical substance of the research.
5/10, if we’re being nice. 0 if we’re feeling harsh.
As for clarity of writing, this paper deserves negative points, if that’s a possibility. Assuming it is not, a 0/5 would be appropriate, meaning that, in total, a fair grade would be 0-5 points out of 25.
So was the instructor justified? Maybe, but there’s plenty of blame to go around in this situation, and the instructor, who, of course, uses “they/them” pronouns, displayed “their” incompetence, incoherence, and bias in a way that absolutely does warrant criticism.
For example, the instructor says Fulnecky’s paper was “highly offensive” and claims that “sex is neither binary nor fixed.”
This isn’t acceptable. Whether her statements hurt an instructor’s feelings is irrelevant, as only the quality of a student’s work and adherence to the grading rubric should matter, and it does potentially suggest a viewpoint discrimination issue. And biological sex is, in fact, binary and fixed, so grading a student based on false assertions is a serious problem.
The university can and should investigate the instructor over these concerns. (The university has placed the instructor on leave.)
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But is Fulnecky a model student victimized for her Christian beliefs? Is her “zero” grade some national outrage, as everyone from Fox News to Turning Point USA to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) seems to think?
No, not really, unless they think religious freedom includes the right to skip your assigned reading, ignore assignment requirements, and submit largely unrelated, incoherent word vomit for your homework and still get an A. Yet something tells me that is not, in fact, what the Constitution’s framers had in mind when they drafted the First Amendment.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.