Earlier this month, we reported on Samantha Fulnecky, a mediocre OU student who received a failing grade for an essay that deserved it because she wasn’t on topic, didn’t cite sources, and didn’t even meet the required word count, among other shortcomings. To let white conservatives — including the Turning Point USA propagandists she ran to with her story — tell it, Fulnecky was treated unfairly for her Christian conservative beliefs, not because she wrote an essay about how her god says it’s OK to bully trans people for an assignment that centered around traditional gender stereotypes, not trans people. Well, on Monday, OU announced that the graduate teaching assistant who gave Fulnecky the zero grade she deserved, Mel Curth, “will no longer have instructional duties at the University” after its investigation found that Curth, who happens to be a trans woman, was “arbitrary in the grading of this specific paper,” whatever that means.
OU also noted that, per the university’s grade appeals process, “the grade appeal was decided in favor of the student, removing the assignment completely from the student’s total point value of the class, resulting in no academic harm to the student.
Well, isn’t that interesting?
So Fulnecky claims she was discriminated against due to her faith. OU apparently agreed, despite numerous professors and education experts reading her essay and agreeing that she earned the grade she deserved, and now it doesn’t count towards her overall grade. Every other student who did the assignment gets to live with whatever grade they earned, but not Fulnecky. For her, the academic standards were lowered so that her failure to do an assignment correctly doesn’t hurt her academically, the way it would any other student.
Meanwhile, Curth gets the shaft for doing her job, emphasizing in her response that she was “not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” but because the paper “does not answer the questions for the assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.”
“Using your own personal beliefs to argue against the findings of not only this article, but the findings of countless articles across psychology, biology, sociology, etc. is not best practice,” Curth wrote.
Another instructor concurred with Curth on the grade, telling Fulnecky that “everyone has different ways in which they see the world, but in an academic course such as this you are being asked to support your ideas with empirical evidence and higher-level reasoning.”
On Monday, the university suggested Curth’s explanation for the grade was not satisfactory.
“What is there to say other than that the University of Oklahoma has no academic standards?” asked journalist Peter Sterne in response to the university’s statement.
One civil rights advocate, Brian Tashman, added that the school’s decision opens up numerous questions about how academic papers that focus on a student’s religious beliefs will be graded in the future.
“So if a geology student at the University of Oklahoma says in class the earth is 6,000 years young because that’s what they believe, a geology teacher can’t say squat?” asked Tashman. “What if their religion teaches the earth is flat? Or that all of mankind’s problems can be traced back to Xenu?”
Look, OU is getting dragged to hell (pun absolutely intended) over its decision, and while the people pushing back against the university are making perfectly valid points, they’ve come to the battle armed with facts and logic to fight people who are armed with dogma, delusion and a persecution complex to rival that of their MAGA messiah in the White House, who, along with his administration, also believes white Christians are under attack in a country dominated by white Christians.
These people are stupid, y’all, and Oklahoma’s record on education indicates that Fulnecky and her ilk who live there are right where they belong.
