A University of Oklahoma student who received a failing grade for her essay about gender and societal expectations filed a complaint with the university, charging discrimination over her religious beliefs.
Meanwhile, the graduate instructor who assigned and graded the paper has been put on leave, the Oklahoma governor is weighing in, and the incident has ignited a conversation about whether it’s appropriate to cite the Bible as a source in academic papers.
The story was first reported by the University of Oklahoma chapter of Turning Point USA in an X thread posted on Thanksgiving.
According to the thread, “Samantha Fulnecky was asked to write a 650-word essay reacting to an article about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender. In her essay, Fulnecky argued that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. She cited the Bible to support her stance that eliminating gender in society would be ‘detrimental’ because that would put people ‘farther from God’s original plan for humans.’ She received zero points out of 25 on the essay.”
The group posted Fulnecky’s essay online, as well as the response from her instructor, which the thread identified as Mel Curth.
In a response issued Sunday on social media, the University of Oklahoma said it has launched an investigation, and that the instructor involved had been put on leave. The university did not confirm the identity of any of the people involved, but said the student would not suffer any “academic harm” from the grade.
Fulnecky, a junior at the University of Oklahoma, provided her essay and her instructor’s feedback to The Oklahoman, which published both in full.
In the essay, Fulnecky wrote that eliminating gender as a construct in society would be detrimental “as it pulls us farther from God’s original plan for humans” and said that she doesn’t necessarily think it’s bad to tease people as a way of enforcing gender norms.
“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. I do not want kids to be teased or bullied in school. However, 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. The Bible says that our lives are not our own but that our lives and bodies belong to the Lord for His glory,” she wrote.
In the grading remarks, the instructor said that the essay “heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.”
The instructor went on to say, “To call an entire group of people ‘demonic’ is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population. You are entitled to your own beliefs, but this isn’t a vague narrative of ‘society pushes lies,’ but instead the result of countless years developing psychological and scientific evidence for these claims and directly interacting with the communities involved.
“You may personally disagree with this, but that doesn’t change the fact that every major psychological, medical, pediatric, and psychiatric association in the United States acknowledges that, biologically and psychologically, sex and gender is neither binary nor fixed,” the instructor wrote.
The dispute between the instructor and student has spilled into multiple outlets, with some people denigrating the student and even her mother on Facebook, and others denigrating the reported instructor on the website Rate My Professors — reviews that have since been removed.
The vitriol is hot, in part, because the story sits at a busy intersection in the culture wars: gender ideology and higher education.
For years, religious conservatives bemoaned their lack of influence in the secular halls of higher education, where conformity with progressive gender ideology was expected. In the past year or two, however, there has been a tide change, with even the Chronicle of Higher Education acknowledging last week, in a feature on conservative Princeton scholar Robert P. George, that “progressive orthodoxy” is weakening.
George concurred, saying that he sees a “vibe shift” happening on campuses where “People feel freer to express views that dissent from woke orthodoxy.”
Whatever the academic outcome, all parties involved in this story will learn that the internet has a long tail, and their names will show up in Google searches for perhaps longer than they want — at least the parts that aren’t intentionally deleted.
A social media post from the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Psychology that celebrated Curth as the recipient of the department’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award has been taken offline.