OU STUDENT GRADE APPEAL IS NOT ABOUT ACADEMICS
From our pastor, Robin Meyers:
As someone who is both a pastor and a professor, this issue hits close to home. The furor is, unfortunately, not about real academic concerns, but about a chance for Turning Point USA to seek out and destroy the life of yet another instructor who is transgender. I’ve read both the instructor’s original assignment and rubric--and the actual student essay. It is poorly written and instead of citing empirical scientific sources, as assigned, references (but does not cite) what Samantha Fulnecky believes the Bible has to say about gender and gender roles. In essence, it is that a male God (He) has created men and women to be different and to embrace the roles that He has given them (women to do “womanly” things, and men to be courageous and strong). The article to which she is responding discusses teasing to enforce gender norms. She has no problem with this because the greater problem is the illusion that gender stereotypes even exist, since “that is how God made us.”
She has every right to believe this, of course, and a First Amendment right to express it. The problem isn’t freedom of religion here, but the need for professors to assign writing exercises that insist upon freedom from religion. Her instructor told her repeatedly that she has every right to believe what she believes, but that insisting that anyone who does not share her view is “demonic” or the idea that “society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders” is “not biblical whatsoever” puts anyone with a different view, or who does not regard the Bible as authoritative, in an awkward if not impossible situation. What Fulnecky claims is that if you believe that “lie” it has come from Satan. In other words, just as in our deeply divided country, those who disagree with her are not just wrong, they are evil.
After failing to get her grade changed, and a second professor also concurred that the essay did not meet the assignment, she escalated her fight with university administration, the news media, and the Turning Point chapter at OU. In no time, the 25-point injustice done to a 20-year-old junior who plans to go to medical school but doesn’t know how to cite a source, had 40 million views. She also contacted Governor Stitt, who said the whole thing is “deeply concerning”—worried, no doubt, about what could happen to federal funding for OU if the current administration decided to practice its trademark extortion.
In other words, Fulnecky, whose mother served as an attorney defending two people who participated in the January 6th insurrection, believed that like-mother-like-daughter the best way to solve a complicated academic problem is to blow things up, sully the reputation of your own university, and get the transgender instructor who dared to challenge your essay fired. Ryan Walters called her a rock star, and he should know integrity when he sees it.
I truly hope that my alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, will step up and remind the world what a university is for and what a university does. In addition to freedom of religion we need to protect academic freedom. When a student turns in a poorly argued paper in a science class with no scientific reasoning behind it, that student deserves to fail. Or to put it in a biblical metaphor that Fulnecke would appreciate, to “get kicked out of the garden.”