site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It's yesterday's news at this point, but the recent University of Oklahoma essay controversy has continued to fester in my brain for the sheer incongruence of reactions. In case you haven't heard, Samantha Fulnecky, a junior studying Psychology, received a 0 for submitting an essay whose central argument was essentially a blunt appeal to Biblical inerrancy. While I find this a suspect choice in even most religious studies courses, the assignment tasked her with reviewing a journal article about the effects of social pressures on adolescent gender presentation and identification - hardly something the Bible addresses directly. In response, the graduate student instructor, who is trans, gave her a zero. Fulnecky, in her (apparent) indignance, complained to the local chapter of TPUSA that this is an act of religious discrimination, and sparks flew. And they've kept flying. Fulnecky received an honorary award from the Oklahoma state Congress and has been speaking about her situation on Fox News. The university has sided with Fulnecky, placing the instructor on indefinite administrative leave until...the situation blows over? It's unclear how much "investigation" this really requires, but it is clear that Fulnecky has won the battle.

I am more interested in the war. Conservative scuffles at universities seem dime-a-dozen at this point, which makes it all the more surprising that this one has climbed out of the Twitter pit to receive national attention. For one, the essay is not particularly high-quality. This is not a case where a student submitted a carefully argued theological analysis, but instead appealed to the most straightforward of scriptural arguments and didn't even cite the verses in question! While the resulting grade of 0 seems slightly punitive and I don't doubt it was motivated by some level of personal offense, the professor's response hardly could be considered discriminatory. I've heard some grumblings that the instructor gave this grade specifically because she is trans - so it hurt more, or something - but I think most cis psychology profs these days would have a similar reaction. I think Fulnecky deserved some points, but not many. She lacks one of the most foundational skills a college-level writer needs: adapting your ideas to your audience.

Speculation on Twitter is running wild, suggesting that Fulnecky intentionally submitted a poor essay to gain some conservative street-cred, that her lawyer mother is involved, and plenty of other mental gymnastics. I don't blame the gymnasts - this case has been elevated to levels that are suspiciously unjustified, in my view. The banal reason is that it's easy pickings for conservative commentators who are salivating for any story they can nut-pick to put on the evening news block. But is that really all it takes? Can a religious person do any wrong in the eyes of the New Right? I realize writing this that I sound completely incredulous that the media could blow up a story, but seeing it happen in real-time has been pretty mind boggling. Read the essay and let me know what you think. I don't want to be mistaken for consensus-building here, and I would welcome any and all steelmans for the pro-Fulnecky position. Maybe I've been cut by yet another scissor statement (in this case, essay).

This is further evidence to me that red-tribers have completely abandoned most institutes of higher education. It's no longer a question of "we must reform the universities and stop them from being ideologically possessed!" but "the universities are ideologically possessed and the only way out is avoidance/destruction." It doesn't help when college graduates seem to be fleeing the red tribe like it's got the plague - it's much easier to prop up a controversy when the remaining red tribers lack the personal experience to vet it properly. All this to say: I think universities are really going to have it rough under this administration. They've already been sued to hell and back. If the red tribe couldn't turn the university system around by playing nice, they're going to do it by force - social, legal, or otherwise.

That essay reminded of one of my favorite pieces of writing advice, "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" by Paul Roberts:

It's Friday afternoon, and you have almost survived another week of classes. You are just looking forward dreamily to the weekend when the English instructor says: “For Monday you will turn in a five-hundred-­word composition on college football.”

Well, that puts a good hole in the weekend. You don't have any strong views on college football one way or the other. You get rather excited during the season and go to all the home games and find it rather more fun than not. On the other hand, the class has been reading Robert Hutchins in the anthology and perhaps Shaw's “Eighty-­Yard Run,” and from the class discussion you have got the idea that the instructor thinks college football is for the birds. You are no fool. You can figure out what side to take.

After dinner you get out the portable typewriter that you got for high school graduation. You might as well get it over with and enjoy Saturday and Sunday. Five hundred words is about two double­-spaced pages with normal margins. You put in a sheet of paper, think up a title, and you're off:

WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHED

College football should be abolished because it's bad for the school and also for the players. The players are so busy practicing that they don't have any time for their studies.

This, you feel, is a mighty good start. The only trouble is that it's only thirty­-two words. You still have four hundred and sixty­-eight to go, and you've pretty well exhausted the subject. It comes to you that you do your best thinking in the morning, so you put away the typewriter and go to the movies. But the next morning you have to do your washing and some math problems, and in the afternoon you go to the game. The English instructor turns up too, and you wonder if you've taken the right side after all. Saturday night you have a date, and Sunday morning you have to go to church. (You can't let English assignments interfere with your religion.) What with one thing and another, it's ten o'clock Sunday night before you get out the typewriter again. You make a pot of coffee and start to fill out your views on college football. Put a little meat on the bones.

WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHED

In my opinion, it seems to me that college football should be abolished. The reason why I think this to be true is because I feel that football is bad for the colleges in nearly every respect. As Robert Hutchins says in his article in our anthology in which he discusses college football, it would be better if the colleges had race horses and had races with one another, because then the horses would not have to attend classes. I firmly agree with Mr. Hutchins on this point, and I am sure that many other students would agree too.

One reason why it seems to me that college football is bad is that it has become too commercial. In the olden times when people played football just for the fun of it, maybe college football was all right, but they do not play college football just for the fun of it now as they used to in the old days. Nowadays college football is what you might call a big business. Maybe this is not true at all schools, and I don't think it is especially true here at State, but certainly this is the case at most colleges and universities in America nowadays, as Mr. Hutchins points out in his very interesting article. Actually the coaches and alumni go around to the high schools and offer the high school stars large salaries to come to their colleges and play football for them. There was one case where a high school star was offered a convertible if he would play football for a certain college.

Another reason for abolishing college football is that it is bad for the players. They do not have time to get a college education, because they are so busy playing football. A football player has to practice every afternoon from three to six and then he is so tired that he can't concentrate on his studies. He just feels like dropping off to sleep after dinner, and then the next day he goes to his classes without having studied and maybe he fails the test.

(Good ripe stuff so far, but you're still a hundred and fifty­-one words from home. One more push.)

Also I think college football is bad for the colleges and the universities because not very many students get to participate in it. Out of a college of ten thousand students only seventy­-five or a hundred play football, if that many. Football is what you might call a spectator sport. That means that most people go to watch it but do not play it themselves.

(Four hundred and fifteen. Well, you still have the conclusion, and when you retype it, you can make the margins a little wider.)

These are the reasons why I agree with Mr. Hutchins that college football should be abolished in American colleges and universities.

On Monday you turn it in, moderately hopeful, and on Friday it comes back marked “weak in content” and sporting a big “D.”

This essay is exaggerated a little, not much. The English instructor will recognize it as reasonably typical of what an assignment on college football will bring in. He knows that nearly half of the class will contrive in five hundred words to say that college football is too commercial and bad for the players. Most of the other half will inform him that college football builds character and prepares one for life and brings prestige to the school.

As he reads paper after paper all saying the same thing in almost the same words, all bloodless, five hundred words dripping out of nothing, he wonders how he allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy and interesting life as an electrician or a confidence man.

But note that, even in 1958, Roberts felt such an essay was deserving of a D, not an F.

Oh boy how the times have changed. In this case the teacher gives a lazy an uninspired assignment, and is pissed to get equally lazy and uninspired essays back. This mostly wouldn't fly in current year.

I always had writers block so I never did well in school, but the best thing I learned was how to piss out 500 words of tired but passable slop in an hour.

I don't know if the professor was discriminatory without seeing the other papers, but I think they should get an award for giving a zero mark. A student this dumb, whether religious or not, ought to be sent the message 'This subject and you are simply not in conversation, and no good will come of us continuing this relationship,' so she can do with that information what she will.

If the student received 100% grades on all prior essays in this class with this same level of writing, then some new rubric is being retroactively applied that isn't the same as the one that is publicly available. You can't all of the sudden change course on your grading criteria and apply a harsher standard and make it seem like the student didn't follow the guidelines. That will rouse suspicion, especially when you apply context like the teacher being trans, or OU having an F rating by FIRE, or that Psych courses and departments are generally quite left leaning, or that it's well known that universities across the country have had a chilling effect on certain types of speech. As a teacher/prof, you might win that argument when it's between you and the student, but once this incident is made available to public scrutiny you're going to have a hard time.

The 100% part honestly shocks me. Vanishingly few essays should receive 100%, and none by her unless she is concealing her reasoning ability in the essay for which she received zero. But maybe Oklahoma/the US has very different marking schemes than ones I am used to in the UK.

I went to this university for part of my undergrad. It's a solid state school, but it's not exactly packed with Einsteins (myself included). There are bright kids there, but in general we're not going to compete with the capabilities of students from schools in the Northeast or West Coast. If my assumptions on the context are correct, the grading doesn't shock me. I suspect that the class was regularly assigned articles to read, and then react to, and possibly discuss in class. I'd be willing to bet the trans teacher probably graded those reaction essays pretty generously, allowing students to express personal opinions so long as they turned something in. That same generosity was probably extended to Fulnecky earlier in the semester, even if it was apparent that she leaned religious or socially conservative.

But then she submitted this last paper.

We're all aware here that over the last decade universities were much more aggressive about policing certain kinds of speech, and in these environments there are words and frameworks that aren't really tolerated. This teacher's worldview doesn't see words like 'demonic' or 'bible' or 'god' as worthy of being part of the college environment. Couple that with their own personal feelings about gender expression, and you end up with someone who feels completely justified in giving a zero grade on a paper like this. The leftist online narrative is that this paper is being evaluated as a flawed assignment, but I highly suspect that this paper was graded using an entirely different, undiscussed, unwritten rubric.

I never got 100% on a college essay. They always have a series of issues with any writing sample. Or they did back when I attended university.

What exactly were you expecting, given the marking scheme for this assignment? Why are you still looking for ways to shit on the student, now that it's abundantly clear the issue is with this professor / this university / the absolute state of academia in general?

'This subject and you are simply not in conversation, and no good will come of us continuing this relationship,'

This phrase now makes me wish some professor would set an essay about how slavery was good, actually and when they get 200 outraged essays simply screaming NO YOU ARE A BIGOT RACIST, then they can serenely mark them all zero with "this subject and you are simply not in conversation".

Clearly my lack of university education shows because I never heard the notion of being "in conversation" with an abstract concept before.

I haven't read the essay in question but it sounds dumb, and the student was probably looking for some degree of martyrdom (it's hard for people this young to disentangle the zeal of wishing to stand up for their beliefs from the psychological drive to be persecuted so they can feel justified and morally superior and convinced of their own virtue) so yes, the essay should be harshly marked if it doesn't engage with the topic at all.

On the other hand, the teacher being trans does lead to the suspicion, however unjustified, that they took this personally and are simply being vengeful, since they are as incapable as the student of being objective on this and putting their own beliefs aside to be dispassionate. A mess all round, and Ms. Student seems to have won the point she really wanted to win: I too am like the Christians of the First Century, persecuted by the world.

Well, she still has time to grow up.

I would think "no you are a bigot racist" essays (written in response to e.g. reading Mein Kampf in a history class) would indeed get very low marks in a halfway decent university (though maybe not at Oklahoma). There is lots to say about stuff you disagree with, and I don't think it's been established that her sin in the professor's eyes was just disagreeing with the research she was responding to. It seems like her deeper failing was not even trying to understand it.

She's related to some local republican Apparatchiks and it was taken up by the local TPUSA chapter immediately. It was a set up and the university chose to knuckle under.

Learning to argue for points you don't agree with at all is a seriously underrated skill

I think the smart thing if you're a trans professor and someone does this is to give them a B- and let some cis professor fail them in the next level class up.

Giving them a zero is just taking the bait.

Apparently she was not sent that message at all, but rather the message that her professor and TA are anti-Christian bigots, but that the zeitgeist in mid-America is more on her side than theirs.

While the resulting grade of 0 seems slightly punitive and I don't doubt it was motivated by some level of personal offense

A grade of zero should really only ever be given as punishment for cheating, plaigarism or not handing anything in. I'm sure the essay was very bad, but it was at least an essay, that I assume she wrote herself rather than getting ChatGPT to do it, I hear Mr GPT isn't that big on biblical literalism.

She got a 0 because she demonstrated the wrong political position. As for the correct political position, well, it was an essay about gender roles being marked by a guy who pretends to be a woman.

Fulnecky wrote that she was frustrated by the premise of the article because she doesn't believe that there are more than two genders based on her understanding of the Bible

Rejecting the premise of the question is a perfectly legitimate way to answer an essay question.

There shouldn't be participation trophies in college. If she submitted an essay completely devoid of the type of content the assignment asked for, she should get a zero. There's no reason to give points for turning in a piece of paper with words on it.

Rejecting the premise of the question is a perfectly legitimate way to answer an essay question.

No it's not. The assignment wasn't to give her opinion, it was to analyze a paper within a particular framework. You can't do that if you refuse to entertain the framework as true long enough for the assignment. She shouldn't have taken the class in the first place if she refused to do that.

If she submitted an essay completely devoid of the type of content the assignment asked for, she should get a zero.

Fortunately for Fulnecky, she did submit an essay with the type of content the assignment asked for.

No it's not. The assignment wasn't to give her opinion, it was to analyze a paper within a particular framework.

Go read the publicly available rubric and come back to make a comment when you are more informed. It was part of the assignment.

Wasn’t the assignment read this piece and react to it?

A grade of zero should really only ever be given as punishment for cheating, plaigarism or not handing anything in.

This depends a lot on the prof in question, and also on the range. 0 out of 5 is very different from 0 out of 100. (It seems it was zero out of 25, which indeed seems a bit harsh.)

Rejecting the premise of the question is a perfectly legitimate way to answer an essay question.

It depends. Let's leave aside the fact that the topic of her essay is obviously culture war ground zero (and if the Christians and the Grievance Studies people end up wiping each other from public universities, I could not be happier). If you decide to study a certain subject, you need to engage with its premises a bit. Not necessarily believe they are true in your heart of hearts, but at least make legible arguments with them.

If you are a young earth creationist studying geology, and you refuse to date any rock to older than 4000 BC, you will fail.

If you are studying medieval French poetry, and are of the perfectly legal opinion that French is just strange monkey noises which do not convey any deeper meaning, you will fail.

If you are studying mathematics and believe that every axiomatic system is self-contradictory, and use this belief in your 'proofs', you will fail (with zero out of 100, no less).

If you are studying Catholic theology and not only are an atheist, but also believe that nothing which Augustine wrote could possibly be worth knowing, you will fail. (A lesser form of this is why I would not make a good theology student.)

None of these beliefs prevent you from completing your subject per se. A geology student who rephrases the question as "What does Satan want me to believe about the age of this rock?" can still ace his test. A mathematician can privately be a fan of falso while also being willing to construct proofs under lesser axiomatic systems. If I had sufficient incentive, I could probably learn enough doctrine to pass a theology class.

From the AP link:

Students were asked to write a 650-word response to an academic study that examined whether conformity with gender norms was associated with popularity or bullying among middle school students.

IMHO, the fact that there are people who conform more or less to gender norms is certainly one of the less controversial ones as far as gender study findings go. You do not have to pay lip service to gender nonbinary to engage with this question. (Also, I have the suspicion that most Christians would not consider each and every gender norm to be good. I mean, Andrew Tate and Stoya are both beyond the 99th percentile of fulfilling some gender norms, and it seems most Christian parents would prefer their middle-school kids to behave androgynously rather than emulating them.)

So without looking up the 'study' and the exact phrasing of the question, this looks more like, "geology student was asked to describe coastal erosion, gets on a weird tangent about the earth is 6000 years old for most of her essay while failing to mention water."

If you are a young earth creationist studying geology, and you refuse to date any rock to older than 4000 BC, you will fail.

The stated grading criteria for the essay were very unlike "what is the age of this rock?".

It was "are bullied girls more likely to be tomboys" and the woman used it to rant against the woke gender agenda.

A smart partisan would have found all sorts of technical excuses to give the paper a low grade: certainly, there would be a pretext for it. But a zero is so transparently unwarranted that it became blatantly obvious that it is discrimination. The professor in question would have gotten away with it, if it was merely a year ago. But it is now, and universities can no longer cover for such behavior under the chud-occupied bureaucracy.

You think that being so schooled in civil rights history, academics could detect an obvious Rosa Parks coming their way. But clearly, the intellectual standards at the academy have been slipping broadly as to fall for such an trap. Progressives are ill-suited to holding institutional power because they cannot imagine themselves holding it - it is antithetical to their whole ethos. So when when they do, they act clumsily and overtly, smugly confident that there will be no consequences for unsubtle tyranny. They are wrong, and this is a consequence long overdue.

But clearly, the intellectual standards at the academy have been slipping broadly as to fall for such an trap.

It wouldn't have been a trap a year ago, it would have been a triumph. The student would have been failed (or perhaps kicked out of the class or even expelled) and the TA would have been lauded for it.

At OU? She would have been speaking in the Oklahoma statehouse which would pass a law restricting the university's independence, maybe. That may have been the goal. But losing the war was gonna be implausible.

It's unclear how much "investigation" this really requires, but it is clear that Fulnecky has won the battle.

The obvious place to start would be the following question: "Let's see the other essays submitted and the grades they received." I would imagine someone asking that question is why the school has so abruptly sided with Fulnecky, because I would bet a hundred bucks to the charity of my opposite's choice that there were objectively worse essays given better grades in that grading pile. Do you think I'm overly confident in that assessment, particularly given the school's response? If you don't, then what's the basis of our disagreement?

While the resulting grade of 0 seems slightly punitive and I don't doubt it was motivated by some level of personal offense, the professor's response hardly could be considered discriminatory.

You think that the grade seems punitive. I agree. I think the essay deserves a bad grade, and it seems to me you agree. The question is why it got this specific grade. How many zeroes has this instructor handed out over the last year or two or five? What patterns might emerge from how the instructor typically concludes that a zero is assigned? If, as many other people are noting, most instructors never give a zero for a turned-in essay exhibiting even the most minimal amount of effort, and this instructor is typically no different, then the obvious question is what was different here. And shucks howdy, wouldn't you know it, we appear to have a likely candidate right off the bat...

Religion is a protected category under civil rights law. I'm given to understand that discrimination in grading based on protected characteristics would be a straightforward violation of the student's first amendment rights, and is the sort of thing that institutions with deep pockets have been routinely taken to the cleaners for over the last several decades. Nor is this issue some mystery wrapped in an enigma; show the rest of the grading pile, and maybe the last few grading piles too, and one of two patterns should clearly emerge.

Again, the argument is not that this student wrote a good essay. The argument, which appears to have won more or less immediately, is that the instructor was nakedly discriminatory on the basis of religion against one of their students. No one is confused about whether or not this is an instantly career-ending offense in the general case, but until recently there has, by all evidence available, been a tacit understanding within Academia that Christians don't really have actual civil rights.

It's possible that Fulnecky is actually an ignoramus and the essay in question represents the best intellectual output she's capable of producing. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the University should award her her erstwhile instructor's degree, because she just schooled them. I do not think that considering the later possibility represents "mental gymnastics", and again, this is a question we could easily answer by examining her other essays. I'd bet most of them read like median college student essays.

The possibility you ought to consider a bit more is that this is may in fact be an example of student activism, of exactly the sort Academia has openly claimed a mission to encourage and inculcate for many, many decades. In that case, the only novel bit here would be who it's aimed at.

Religion is a protected category under civil rights law. I'm given to understand that discrimination in grading based on protected characteristics would be a straightforward violation of the student's first amendment rights, and is the sort of thing that institutions with deep pockets have been routinely taken to the cleaners for over the last several decades. Nor is this issue some mystery wrapped in an enigma; show the rest of the grading pile, and maybe the last few grading piles too, and one of two patterns should clearly emerge.

If your religion says that you can drive at any speed on any road, and you write that down in your driving test, you will fail your driving test. That is the only way to run a society without a state church.

Now, from what I have seen, the question for the essay was about gender roles and not about the existence of non-binaries, which is what she spent most of her argument on. A failing grade is such well deserved.

Is it plausible that she got a zero for picking her beliefs most likely to offend her prof instead of going on some other mostly unrelated tangent instead? Sure, and yes, that would be unfair.

I am also not sure how discrimination law works, exactly. Surely not everything downstream from a religious belief must be ignored. If I go to a job interview stark naked and predictably do not get hired, can I turn around and successfully sue them if nakedness is required by my religion?

My gut feeling as a godless European is that there is a difference between being directly discriminated against based on your religion and being indirectly discriminated against because of behaviors required by your religion which break popular social norms or laws.

So a prof who decided that no Christian students would pass their class would be discriminating based on religion, while one who simply decided to give zero points to any essays which argued for gender essentialism without citing scientific sources would not.

Did you read the essay? It wasn’t good but your claim that she spent most of the time talking about non binaries instead of gender roles fails reading comprehension

I suspect they just forgot to add the word 'not' to that sentence.

My gut feeling as a godless European is that there is a difference between being directly discriminated against based on your religion and being indirectly discriminated against because of behaviors required by your religion which break popular social norms or laws.

In the US nowadays, with opposite CW valence, this sounds like a clear-cut case of "disparate impact". Of course it's rather concerning if a protected group can be disparately impacted "by choice", but there lies a whole rabbit hole of further spicy questions.

You are basically whitewashing the TAs actions here. If the article was instead about how prayer helped coping with some aspects of adolescence, and an athiest student wrote a response essay which said this was ridiculous because there was no God, with the same rubric, and they were given a zero for it, this would be just as clearly religious discrimination.

Yep, sometimes you really can tell exactly what's going on by reversing the valence. We don't have access to the TA here to ask some clarifying questions, but I have little doubt that they would end up a stammering mess and contradicting themself when trying to explain why they gave the grade they gave.

The obvious place to start would be the following question: "Let's see the other essays submitted and the grades they received." I would imagine someone asking that question is why the school has so abruptly sided with Fulnecky, because I would bet a hundred bucks to the charity of my opposite's choice that there were objectively worse essays given better grades in that grading pile. Do you think I'm overly confident in that assessment, particularly given the school's response? If you don't, then what's the basis of our disagreement?

I mean, the University of Oklahoma almost certainly is highly worried about the state government taking away big chunks of its independence for political reasons, and telling a trans TA(so not even a professor) to shut up and sit down is a small price to pay.

taking away big chunks of its independence for political reasons

It's literally just "your rules, fairly". If they didn't like that, maybe it shouldn't have been their rules to begin with.

If this is in fact an example of unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religion, then I would not describe the removal of their independence as "for political reasons".

The screenshots of Samantha’s essay I’ve seen so far are like moderate cringe porn, where I immediately want to tap out due to cringe. I was half expecting a “since the dawn of time” to pop-up somewhere. The basicness is endearing in a way.

The 25th percentile of OU admittees have an SAT score in the mid 1100s and the average mid 1200s. This is well above the overall average SAT score of mid 1000s, where SAT-takers are already positively selected for intelligence.

So if you (like me) are cringing at the erudition (or lack thereof) of Samantha’s essay—consider what the average person’s thoughts might look like in essay form, much less the average person from a low average IQ population group. Akin to how Scalabrine is closer to Lebron in basketball ability than he is to you, Samantha may very well be closer in intelligence to you than she is the average person, much less an average person of some lower-IQ population group.

Trans TA vs. thot undergrad: unstoppable force vs. immovable object. As a more than WOULDable chick (obligatory: I’d at least give her a D), Samantha has likely rarely received negative feedback all her teenaged and adult life, so a zero on a college essay would feel like a massive affront to her Wonderfulness. This was not part of her Princess Journey, so vassals and serfs from OU, TPUSA, Fox News, the Online Right must rally to defend her honor. Given the attention and simpery she’s been provided, I can only imagine her as the seething-mask-smirking-underneath wojak.

Speculation on Twitter is running wild, suggesting that Fulnecky intentionally submitted a poor essay to gain some conservative street-cred, that her lawyer mother is involved, and plenty of other mental gymnastics

If there is indeed material Online Right cope on that front, it’d be quite amusing if Samantha’s simps are going with the “no way is she that stupid, she must had only been pretending to be retarded as a form of 5D chess to pwn the libs” line of conjecture. If Mulder’s sister Samantha really was abducted by aliens, I suppose it’s possible OU Samantha could had been intentionally laying a trap card (perhaps “trap” in more ways than one).

However, a zero on such an essay is clearly punitive and vindictive to me and the trans TA should be removed from her/they/[their?] role as TA. The TA sounds like a caricature of “this is who is online calling you [racist/misogynistic /homophobic/transphobic].” Unfortunately, for every such TA relieved of their duties, many more will remain to do their thing.

Both the trans TA and the other graduate student instructor’s (“she/her/hers”) responses are its_all_so_tiresome.jpg inducing. Most self-aware bio-female social science graduate student: “In addition, your paper directly and harshly criticizes your peers and their opinions, which are just as valuable as yours.”

For essay grading, especially non-STEM grading for “reaction essays” at schools like OU, the left bound basically starts at 60% if you submit anything vaguely resembling a halfhearted effort that’s not clearly plagiarized, perhaps higher. If you can regurgitate some semblance of the professor’s passphrases, even without providing any suggestion that you have any comprehension of the passphrases, you’re likely already in 80%+ territory.

As a more than WOULDable chick (obligatory: I’d at least give her a D)

I feel like you missed a Fulnecky/full throat joke.

I mean, it's very plausible she didn't put a lot of effort into the essay. This was clearly intended as a political stunt. I suspect it worked better than it was supposed to- the goal was probably to testify about the need to give TPUSA actual legal authorities over state universities before the Oklahoma house.

You made me google her. Agreed on giving her the..I mean a…D

While it's not a good essay, it does look like the student read at least some of the article, and herself wrote what she actually thought of it, which is better than a growing number of essays lately, so a 0 is pretty outrageous. It would be fine to not give her full points, since she's only engaging with the article in a very superficial way, but it seems like since it's just a personal reflection and not that serious of a paper, she should have gotten at least half points.

Bluntly, it is a crap essay, poorly written and is nothing but her expressing her Biblical views. It is not college-level writing.

Did it deserve a 0? Probably not. It's... grammatical and uses complete sentences and is sorta on topic inasmuch as the student is "reacting" to the article as directed. But I think giving it a C would be extremely generous even by modern grade-inflationary standards.

I have no doubt the trans prof threw a fit upon reading it. But it's very unfortunate that righties have no better material to rally around. A smarter student could have written a critical essay that would have been harder to justify giving a 0, but Fulnecky frankly does not seem very bright in her interviews.

I think it was probably written to get the Oklahoma congress to take up the problem of increasing supervision on state universities to 'prevent anti-Christian discrimination' and demonstrates the minimum amount of effort needed for that purpose.

A lot of people seem to think this was a trap that the trans instructor stepped into. I'm skeptical of these sorts of political chess game theories. Unless evidence comes to light that Fulnecky was in fact conspiring with someone or put up to it by TPUSA or some other organization, it seems unlikely to me that she's smart or strategic enough to have planned this out. I think the more likely explanation is that she decided to tell this trans instructor what's what according to the Bible, was outraged at receiving a zero, and then someone suggested to her that she should file a complaint. It attracted buzz because of CW and here we are.

Righties have rallied around a dim but photogenic Bible Karen, and the trans instructor predictably threw a shitfit when challenged. Both sides following a very stupid and tiresome script. An early version of ChatGPT could have generated this plot.

The TA and professor also appear dimwitted. Just three dumb people arguing but one of them is attractive so…

Uh, didn't the local chapter of the TPUSA play a starring role?

Yes, but were they involved beforehand or did they hear about Fulnecky's complaint afterwards? Or did she go to them when she got a zero?

There is the version where TPUSA put her up to it, the way a lot of organizations go looking for sympathetic cases and even stage them. There is the version where Fulnecky just wrote a Bible paper in her class, got a zero, and went looking for sympathy and found TPUSA. And there is the version where TPUSA put out some kind of mailer ("Are you a Christian student being persecuted by your woke professors?") and Fulnecky was inspired to see if she could provoke her instructor into "persecuting" her. I am inclined to think it's probably #2, and would be surprised if Fulnecky came up with #3 all on her own.

We're never going to know, but she's related to some Republican bigwigs.

I see a lot of people, myself included, thinking that it's very unlikely that this instructor in particular typically assigns zeroes to bad essays from their students. If we are correct that this is an unusual deviation from their standard grading practices, the question is why, and we think we have a pretty good idea of the answer. I'd be surprised if you think either of those assumptions are unfounded, but am prepared to be corrected. This seems very likely to me to be an open-and-shut case of unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religion by a state employee, and I see zero argument for why it should not be pursued more or less exactly as it has been. The ACLU made its name off similar cases; were they wrong to do so?

The far more marginal question is whether this was a cunning plan on the part of the student. I would not bet on that question either way; I've seen lots of cases where people did things like this intentionally, and in fact setting these kinds of traps appears to have been a standard part of civil rights litigation since the invention of the discipline. On the other hand, average people are of average intelligence, and organic tribal friction is going to be orders of magnitude more common than cunning ploys.

If you disagree that this is likely to be a case of unconstitutional discrimination, I'd be interested to hear your reasoning. Do you think this instructor typically hands out zeroes? If not, do you think this essay in particular deserved a zero for reasons other than its viewpoint? Or if it was discrimination, do you think the student should have accepted their zero quietly, or else complained through the university system first? Why should Righties not rally around this dim but photogenic Bible Karen? What is objectionable about them doing so?

But what I see in the other side of the conversation is people frowning over these events, and then explaining their frowning with justifications that make zero sense, based entirely on transparently-isolated demands for rigor. This is not surprising, we are all tribal down to the white of our bones and this is what tribals do. I will certainly say that I do not consider it tiresome: it seems overwhelmingly likely that this is the law working exactly the way it's supposed to.

This seems very likely to me to be an open-and-shut case of unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religion by a state employee, and I see zero argument for why it should not be pursued more or less exactly as it has been.

Ackshually... I wonder. It might be viewpoint discrimination, but is it religious viewpoint discrimination? If a student submitted an essay equally critical of trans stuff, but based it on appeals to evolutionary psychology and HBD and inescapable biological realities, I imagine they would get treated similarly.

So it's not clear that religion is the motivating factor here. I don't know if whatever rules there are against religious discrimination would extend to atheistic holders of naughty opinions, but I suspect they wouldn't.

I already said the essay probably doesn't deserve a 0 (though it certainly deserves a D at best). I agree the instructor probably gave her a 0 out of pique/personal offense.

Does it meet the legal definition of "religious discrimination"? I doubt it, but determining Constitutionality is more complicated than "Does the instructor dislike Christians?" or "Did other students who wrote crappy essays get zeroes?" That said, you don't really care much what courts and the law says nowadays, do you?

Was it actually religious discrimination, in the sense that the instructor was motivated by animosity for the student's Christian beliefs, as opposed to just being outraged at the student's opinions? (Throwing words like "demonic" doesn't exactly help Fulnecky's case.) I am only slightly more sympathetic to Fulnecky than I would be to a student writing a creationist paper in a science class. Slightly more sympathetic because I actually believe in evolution and I don't believe in "multiple (sic) genders," but I am unmoved by Biblical arguments in either case.

That said, what should Fulnecky have done? Well, protesting low grades is a time-honored tradition, and nowadays every student thinks they should get an A and protests if they don't. If in fact zeroes are uncommon in this class, and especially if she was the only student to receive a zero, I'd definitely agree she was treated unfairly. Does that mean Christians are being persecuted in this class? Eh- did anyone else write such a stupid essay? Would someone writing a paper that says "Actually, there are only two genders and trans people are gross and delusional" without involving religious arguments get a better grade?

I don't really "object" to righties defending her, per se, but I think I made my position pretty clear. She wrote a bad, dumb essay. The instructor reacted badly and is probably a fool. In a sane and reasonable world (bitter laughter), they'd have had a private discussion, maybe involved the department chair, and agreed she deserved something more than a 0, or been given an opportunity to revise. Instead, we are in our world, so a stupid essay in a stupid class about a stupid subject with stupid people is a national news story.

If you disagree that this is likely to be a case of unconstitutional discrimination, I'd be interested to hear your reasoning.

To my mind, the possible reason starts with the fact that there are different types of shitty essay that may be equally shitty in terms of their writing quality, structure, and reasoning, but that are different in terms of what they herald about what's next for the student. This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied." A different, equally shitty essay, perhaps a non-religious-fundamentalist one – but not necessarily – might make me think, "Okay, this is terrible work, but perhaps with time this student is open to being shepherded through to a likely still bad but passing grade." The latter type of essay might simply contain less evidence of close mindedness.

Now is a grade the right language to communicate a message like this to the student? No. A conversation this delicate should be done separately. Nonetheless I sympathise with the professor, and find the idea that the low mark was necessarily about the specifically religious nature of this student's dogmatism to be unproven.

It would by psychology throwing stones. Gender theory is religious belief.

I think the student would have similar things to say about all kinds of areas of psychology though. If they think dysphoria=possession by demons, they're likely to have the same reaction to all kinds of psychological disorders and phemonena, which makes vast swathes of the subject unstudy-able. Now it's a position to say 'most of psychology is religious belief', but if you think that, we are back to the original question of whether red tribe should try to influence academia or just destroy it instead.

Except she didn’t say dysphoria is possession by demons

This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied."

Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know? Or is it just people's personal opinions and models all the way down?

My impression of Psychology is that it's more like Education than it is Psychiatry. Like in Education, the professor apparently thought it reasonable to ask students for their own personal reactions to an article, rather than a summary, or how someone might use the information in a clinical setting, or (heaven forbid!) a test where they had to reproduce some of the findings from memory. Like in Education, there seem to be a number of different frameworks, and someone can talk about Freud or Jung or Pieget or someone who once did a study with 40 boys, some of whom were less gender conforming according to surveys than others, or Rat Park or whatever, there doesn't seem to be a specific body of knowledge that's expected to be learned.

In Education, some professors want students to say that they will put aside merely teaching the standard Rs in favor of spending more time and energy on Radicalization, whereas other professors think that is a bad idea and it's a red flag if students say they will focus more on Radicalization than on 'Rithmetic. But they don't want to cause a headache for themselves, and give everyone a passing grade on personal reflection essays, no matter what they say.

Maybe I'm wrong, and there are more concrete and agreed upon areas of Psychology, but choosing a mediocre paper about an extremely contested culture war topic, asking for a student to react to it, and then punishing her for writing out her actual reaction, doesn't suggest so.

Probably girls like Samantha study Psychology at the state university so they can find a husband and become a Christian women's counselor, endorsed by the pastor's wife. This is a silly state of affairs, but I also went to Baptist Women's Group at my state college, and it is how things are. Since the TA was punished by the university and legislature, not the student, it's apparent that they were the one who misunderstood their role.

Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know?

Psychology students are expected to know anything?

If there's anything that should be canon in Psychology, it would be the subfield of IQ and psychometrics due its reproducibility, reliability, and predictive power. It's basically the only area of Psychology that has been immune to the replication crisis. Yet, instead of being celebrated like a crown jewel and shouted from the hilltops, it's treated like a red-headed step child due it being unflattering to low achievement minorities and ruining people's sense of Just World egalitarianism.

So instead we get stuff like implicit bias, stereotype threat, priming, and "big, fun things" such as power poses signal-boosted and propagandized.

Yeah that’s my biggest problem. The field is inherently unserious. Yet many people “tut tut” about someone bringing in a non academic point of view when the entire field is non academic.

I think you overestimate the other essays

It is not college-level writing.

It isn't, or it shouldn't be?

I feel like it exposes what I've always thought is a flaw in the main US grading system. Officially, anything between 0 and ~60 (depending on the curve) is an F. The best you could possibly do is a 100% A+, unless they want to give extra credit. a 60% is a terrible grade, but it still at least gives you the chance to come back and pass the class. A zero pretty much sinks your grade for the entire class. Giving her a zero here means, not only was her essay bad, it was so bad that she's probably going to flunk the rest of the class no matter how hard she works, unless she begs and grovels for extra credit. There's a bigger range between a zero and a 60% F, then there is between a 60% F and a 100% A+. I just feel like that selects for the wrong incentives.

There are ways to get around this. For example, when I was in school, there was a difference between a Z (0%) given out for no work turned in and an F (50%) given out for shitty work. Likewise, when I was teaching, the head of my department told me that if he saw a student was trying he would give them a high F (e.g. 59%) so that it would only take a little bit more work to pass.

That depends on how much the essay is worth towards the overall grade. It looks like a fairly trivial assignment; if it's worth 25% of the overall grade, that must be a pretty worthless class (which is entirely possible).

Yeah I'm just assuming this is a typical college class where you only write a handful of essays so each one is worth a lot. But the problem starts even with small assignments- you get one zero and you need 10 perfect grades to make up for it.

The essay was bad in a totally representative way, almost all college essays are that bad. That being admitted it’s probable the instructor did discriminate in giving her a zero, although probably it was fairly benign. (“This dumb Christian argument has no merit” not “I hate Christians mark it zero”.)

That said universities started this game by systematically discriminating against conservatives in academia for generations. Academe as the last holdout of genuine Marxism in the West was a joke in the Reagan years. I have brilliant family members who were personally discriminated against in their academic careers for being conservative. I don’t suppose that counts as evidence to anybody with their heads in the sand, but it seems obvious to say that that’s what happened in academia over and over again. It’s not as though conservatives just woke up one day and said, “we’re stupid, we hate those liebruls and their funny learning ways.”

But time is slow and I don’t expect this to percolate into much of a show of force immediately. Conservatives abandoned academia as it turned on them — there wasn’t much fighting back. It will take more time for that attitude to change. If we get a Vance administration that’s when I would expect to start seeing big national fights over collegiate discrimination.

The prompt was “a thoughtful reaction to some aspect of the article”. The article itself seem like poor science. Sci-hub link: https://sci-hub.se/download/moscow/3239/5750dde1cafb6436fe579821d78194db/jewell2013.pdf

You can’t assume that a depressed gender atypical’s self-reported data on teasing is accurate. A teenager with gender dysphoria has a high chance of interpreting innocent comments as teasing, and doubly so if they are depressed, but the study sought to determine whether teasing mediated the experience of depression among dysphorics. A boy wearing a skirt is obviously going to get at least a few comments because it is unusual and noteworthy, and a depressed boy with dysphoria is going to interpret that as teasing and report it as such. The data then cannot tell us whether teasing mediates the relationship between dysphoria and depression, nor can it can inform a prescriptive value statement regarding the morality of teasing dysphorics (the implicit purpose of assigning this bullshit paper). As an example of how dysphorics interpret things as insults, the dysphoric professor interpreted the assertion —

”society pushing a lie […] is demonic”

to imply —

to call an entire group of people "demonic" is highly offensive

When in fact our pious writer was most likely stating that a force in society was demonic, an entirely mainstream and non-controversial belief for a faith which holds that “the whole world lies in the power of the Evil One”.

I side with the Christian in this kurfuffle because her beliefs are prosocial and will lead to greater social flourishing, whereas IMO the dysphoric professor is liable to produce social psych propaganda that just makes the world worse. If the actual use of psychology is its bountiful positive effects on society, and undoubtedly it is if you think about it (we get excited about the useful and informative findings), then the Christian girl is worlds away better than current academia, having internalized a socially-optimal belief system.

I also think a secular publicly funded institution should not be mandating an atheistic framework for opinion-based questions, which seems unconstititional and immoral.

A teenager with gender dysphoria has a high chance of interpreting innocent comments as teasing, and doubly so if they are depressed, but the study sought to determine whether teasing mediated the experience of depression among dysphorics.

The authors actually found, for self-esteem and anxiety:

Although partial mediation was indicated, the relationship [between gender typicality and low self-esteem] was still strong. Thus, regardless of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality had lower self-esteem. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their self-esteem.

Thus, regard- less of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality were more anxious. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their anxiety.

So, the study says that self-reported teasing did not mediate anxiety and self-esteem for boys, and that the negative mental health effects of being gender atypical came from being gender atypical, not from teasing.

The paper is kind of badly organized and an info dump, and I don't care enough to dig into the actual statistical methodology of it, which I assume is what's typical for a psych paper (i.e. bad). But it seems, if anything, less biased and ideological than a typical paper from the field.

(It's also worth pointing out that this isn't looking at dysphoria or wearing skirts, but atypicality in the sense of e.g. being short or bad at sports is gender atypical for boys.)

The current study predicted that gender-based teasing would mediate this link between typicality and mental health, and this prediction was partially supported. Gender-based teasing fully mediated boys’ association between low typicality and greater depressive symptoms and more negative body image. Boys who were low in gender typicality were teased more on the basis of gender, and in turn expressed more depressive symptoms and felt worse about their bodies (as in Smith & Leaper, 2005). Regardless of gender-based teasing, however, boys who were low in typicality had greater anxiety and lower self-esteem (teasing accounted for some of the low self- esteem, but not much). It is unclear why gender-based teasing fully mediated associations with depressive symptoms and body image, but only partially mediated associations with self-esteem and did not mediate associations with anxiety.

The typicality metric was informed by both peer-evaluated and self-reported questionnaires and would include wearing skirts and being dysphoric.

The paper was from over a decade ago and had like 40 boys, not all of whom were gender atypical. More likely than not, not a single one of them were "dysphoric" or wore skirts, with conditions like being short or shy or showtunes being the drivers of atypicality.

They tested four mental health measures, and two of them showed mediation by teasing (for boys), and two didn't. If it were a matter of gender atypical people with mental health issues reporting more teasing, you'd expect all four measures to show mediation. This paper either 1) shows something more complicated or 2) is reporting on noise.

an essay whose central argument was essentially a blunt appeal to Biblical inerrancy.

Bullshit. That's not what her essay was about, and even though it mentions christianity that's not what her shitty essay is about. "Biblical inerrancy" or whatever is totally irrelevant here.

Anyways if you read the assignment posted downthread, you would see that the "reflections" assignment is basically a glorified "how did that make me feel" essay, and not in any way a logical or persuasive writing assignment at all.

This woman very obviously submitted an essay to court controversy. But it's interesting to note- the Oklahoma government is actually based. Principled, but based. And the university is just kind of automatically taking her side(really, it was not a good essay and deserved a failing grade). This looks to me more like evidence that the university is subservient than evidence of it being despoiled.

My guess is that the TA didn't follow the rubric they were given. If they were specifically instructed to, for example, only give a score of 0 if the student fails to submit any work at all, that would explain why they're being disciplined.

Say what you will about psychology, but if I submitted an essay based on Biblical inerrancy to a geology class, I would justifiably expect a low score.

That said, I haven't read the essay, and I should in order to really judge it based on anything other than what other people say about it. Also, in the context of the humanities at least, a 0 should probably rarely be given out for any essay that actually took effort to write. And the possible bias of the grader does matter.

Say what you will about psychology, but if I submitted an essay based on Biblical inerrancy to a geology class, I would justifiably expect a low score.

If psychology was like geology, anyone bringing up the concept of gender would have to be treated as harshly as anyone bringing up God's grand design as an argument (note: there's nothing in her essay about Biblical inerrancy).

The assignment was to react to the reading so as to demonstrate that you actually read it.

Stating that such and such theory would be incompatible with a worldwide flood approximately 5,000 years ago would fit the bill.

Yeah, I would expect her to probably get a C, possibly even a D if it's especially bad, though essays are so messed up lately, I would probably give her some points for clearly writing it herself, anyway.

While the resulting grade of 0 seems slightly punitive and I don't doubt it was motivated by some level of personal offense, the professor's response hardly could be considered discriminatory. I've heard some grumblings that the instructor gave this grade specifically because she is trans - so it hurt more, or something - but I think most cis psychology profs these days would have a similar reaction

The teacher's (or was a TA?) identity groups are not relevant. The most affluent white (cis) female liberal can still do "viewpoint discrimination" or whatever we call it these days. It is discriminatory because of disparate outcome, basically. An equally shitty essay with flipped political valence would obviously (obvious to me) get more points. The grade of 0 being punitive is simply what is meant by 'discrimination' in this context.

I think you're probably right that the student should know better. She likely did know better. I think it might have been bait. This is the equivalent of gay couples suing cakeshops or whatever. I mean this in the "this essay was obviously (to her) shitty."

You say that a college-level writer needs a skill of adapting ideas to the audience, which I kind of expected you to say some variant of (victim blaming), before I had finished reading your post. The purpose of this course is not to teach the students to suck up. It is not suck-up-writing 101 (or 201). If it was, the prompt would say, 'write an argument for the following position.'

You gesture towards the idea that someone (other than the teacher) did wrong here, but I don't see it. My only conclusion here is you think viewpoint discrimination is alright. That's fine, and there are probably principled reasons to think that, but indeed it would make for a short post.

This is an academic test for both the student and the TA: Can the student craft an argument, citing sources; and, Can the TA judge the student's work on its academic merits, regardless of the TA's own viewpoint on the subject matter. They both failed. If the TA had restricted their comments to the essay's academic (lack of) quality, I probably would have little issue with it, but to complain about the use of the word "demonic" from an emotional POV rather than an academic one shows this this TA is not intellectually or tempermentally cut-out for this role. I did repect that the TA, sensing their potential for bias, asked a colleague for a second opinion -- but even that colleague could not focus on the academic quality of the paper, starting with shock that a paper would argue in favor of bullying. That educator should be fired as well.

I think low level bullying is good. It helps enforce some degree of social standards. It helps people learn how to deal with difficult people. It makes people learn that they will survive.

I was bullied when I was a kid. I bullied kids when I was a kid. In both cases, it wasn’t a lot of bully (just general teasing and occasional light physical stuff).

I think that viewpoint discrimination is wrong AND that the essay is quite poor. The professor sounds mad AND certain impartial graders could still give the paper a zero. Separating these facts is a challenge, and I do not blame Fulnecky for her confusion and the lingering possibility of viewpoint discrimination. I don't disagree that a shitty progressive paper may slip by without major issue - that bias persists. It just does not absolve Fulnecky. I am mostly remiss that this situation has ascended to the level of a national spectacle when it could have been resolved with a simple procedure within the institution. I am upset that the first instinct was to cry foul and jump to punditry. There are multiple failure points here, and I am upset about the larger spectacle, as well. Perhaps I should suck it up.

I am not suggesting that Fulnecky needs to change her viewpoint or appease the professor outright. I am just suggesting that in an academic psychology class, it is worth speaking in a way that will be most comprehensible and reflect the standards of the field. The sentence "My prayer for the world and specifically for American society and youth is that they would not believe the lies being spread from Satan..." is meaningless to this professor, nor does it address the point of the assignment.

Again I think what you aren't understanding is that giving students who turn in a paper a 0 is simply not done in modern academia. Grade inflation is absolutely out of control.

The professor could have handed out a D and moved on. Or alternatively just told her to redo it. In current year with grade inflation and whatnot you don't get a 0 if you turn something in. It just doesn't happen. I've handed in seriously terribly bad work in college and still got straight As.

I'm sure the student definitely did this to provoke a controversy, but the professor was an idiot to take the bait. Unfortunately when offended the enemy cannot help but to respond in the most extreme way possible.

I think D is quite generous for that essay, even for a low tier state school. It is occasionally nonsensical and essentially never gets past rambling. For an essay of this length, this os very damning. I have read a lot of high schoolers' writing, and this is not very good for high school. Yes, probably not a 0, but the range of numbers is more like 30-40, not 60-70.

The question isn't what grade you think is appropriate, though. The question is what grades similar essays normally get from the instructor.

Sure, but my guess of what grade that teacher would give other essays of similar quality is based on what I think the essay deserves. In my opinion, it is for sure not a passing essay, which is why I disagree with other commenters' guess of an approximately 60 for essays of similar quality. (And I would argue that my standards are possibly too low given that LLMs can definitely, trivially spit out at least an 85 for this assignment.)

Fair enough; I would be very interested to see the rest of the grading pile to get a sense of the actual quality spread we're looking at here. In any case, 30-40 vs 0 is still quite the divergence.

Fifteen-ish years ago, I saw a paper that was horrendous beyond belief. It was supposed to be an essay on 18th century Europe, and the student handed in a few pages comparing the election of Barack Obama to the Great Depression - in America. And that phrasing still gives far, far too much credit. In five pages, the only sentences that were even coherent were the quotes lifted directly from the Obama campaign website. It was like someone wrote it while on acid, then fed it into GPT1 with instructions to "just fuck my shit up".

Even that student was given an opportunity to write a new paper that was fit for human consumption.

Do you still have a copy of this essay? I need to read it.

No. I was really not supposed to have seen it at all, for reasons of decency and privacy and whatnot. But the professor was so flabergasted, so "Chat, is this real? I need another living soul to confirm that I'm not going insane!" that I was permitted to read experience it.

Perhaps I'll make an inquiry if a copy still exists.

It was like someone wrote it while on acid, then fed it into GPT1 with instructions to "just fuck my shit up".

You might have been reading the 21st century version of Naked Lunch.

While looking into some loose ends from the UCSD remidial math fiasco from the other week, I made the startling discovery that there are approximately zero legally-enforcable standards that require students to demonstrate any knowledge whatsoever in order to recieve a passing grade. There are however, very enforcable legal requirements for schools not to discriminate against students across a broad swath of categories (arguably including intelligence itself).

It's not entirely clear to me what the incentive is to ever fail any student. My sense is that the university has a vague interest in academic integrity in order to maintain its reputation and accreditation, but that at the individual professor level, the risk-payoff matrix weighs overwhelmingly in favor of passing anyone who provides any legally relevant pushback at all. If you don't give in, and the university decides that this opened them up to a lawsuit, you get fired.

It's yesterday's news at this point, but the recent University of Oklahoma essay controversy has continued to fester in my brain for the sheer incongruence of reactions. In case you haven't heard, Samantha Fulnecky, a junior studying Psychology, received a 0 for submitting an essay whose central argument was essentially a blunt appeal to Biblical inerrancy. While I find this a suspect choice in even most religious studies courses, the assignment tasked her with reviewing a journal article about the effects of social pressures on adolescent gender presentation and identification - hardly something the Bible addresses directly. In response, the graduate student instructor, who is trans, gave her a zero. Fulnecky, in her (apparent) indignance, complained to the local chapter of TPUSA that this is an act of religious discrimination, and sparks flew. And they've kept flying. Fulnecky received an honorary award from the Oklahoma state Congress and has been speaking about her situation on Fox News. The university has sided with Fulnecky, placing the instructor on indefinite administrative leave until...the situation blows over? It's unclear how much "investigation" this really requires, but it is clear that Fulnecky has won the battle.

Was the grading rubric's scoring criteria such that biblical inerrancy merited a 0? If so, why have you not provided that? If not, what is the confusion?

It's a rather standard practice in teaching environments that scores are generally a cumulation of different aspects. Are you unfamiliar with it?

This is not a case where a student submitted a carefully argued theological analysis, but instead appealed to the most straightforward of scriptural arguments and didn't even cite the verses in question!

And? What about this merits a 0% according to the assignment rubric?

While the resulting grade of 0 seems slightly punitive and I don't doubt it was motivated by some level of personal offense, the professor's response hardly could be considered discriminatory.

Why not?

Why is this not consistent with a punitive, discriminatory intent by someone who would have reason to believe their response would be posted on social media, and thus might want to coach their response to garner sympathy/support/credulity from people like yourself?

I think Fulnecky deserved some points, but not many.

Why not by what grading rubric?

She lacks one of the most foundational skills a college-level writer needs: adapting your ideas to your audience.

Who is her audience supposed to be?

If her audience is supposed to be the sort of graduate student who would assign a 0 over personal offense, then this indeed might be a failure on her part. On the other hand, if her graduate student grader was not supposed to be that sort of graduate student, then it was the graduate student who failed her.

I don't blame the gymnasts - this case has been elevated to levels that are suspiciously unjustified, in my view.

What, in your view, is suspiciously unjustified about this, as opposed to straightforwardly unjustified? Is your opinion that the state legislature should at least have taken a few more days / weeks to take notice, absent some sort of duplicitous informing of the media? Would a more honest or sincere media have buried the story?

But is that really all it takes?

Petty tyrants being exposed and taken down has been a popular format for millennia. What more is required?

Read the essay and let me know what you think. I don't want to be mistaken for consensus-building here, and I would welcome any and all steelmans for the pro-Fulnecky position. Maybe I've been cut by yet another scissor statement (in this case, essay).

Well, you've provided no objective grounds by which she objectively deserved a 0, but you seem to be taking offense that there's pushback. I don't see why there's any need for a steelman for the pro-Fulnecky position, when the position that seems far less justified is the anti-Fulnecky stance.

This is further evidence to me that red-tribers have completely abandoned most institutes of higher education.

A woman voluntarily in an institution of higher learning is apparently arbitrarily and excessively punished for her dissent in a fashion you have taken greater offense to the objection of than to the punishment itself... and you take this case as evidence that red-tribers have 'abandoned' higher education?

All this to say: I think universities are really going to have it rough under this administration. They've already been sued to hell and back. If the red tribe couldn't turn the university system around by playing nice, they're going to do it by force - social, legal, or otherwise.

As well they should, since they are a considerable part of the population base paying a considerable part of the expense. Any institution that depends on consistent taxpayer support in social, legal, and other forms is well advised to self-regulate itself to maintain that support, and not to antagonize large parts of the electorate to the degree that they withdraw or even invert those critical factors against the institution.

To try and address as many of your pointed rhetorical questions as possible in one fell swoop, my view is that Fulnecky should have known better than to submit an assignment with this sort of argumentation, especially as a junior. The methods used in the field of academic psychology are specific and any deviation from them, especially a major one like this, requires some justification. Learning to work in a field involves learning to speak its language, to participate in the academic community. Perhaps other professors have let it slide but I do not fault this instructor for not doing so. The rubric, especially for such a small potatoes assignment like this, need not state every single possibility nor are there really objective criteria. Plenty of professors give out zeroes for less, and my quickly jotted belief that she deserves "some points" is just because I hate to see any student get a zero for an assignment they at least submitted. They hurt. But that doesn't mean a 0 wasn't deserved.

I am speaking of this event as suspicious because there are ways it could have been handled other than immediately rushing to a political advocacy group. Most universities have mechanisms for reporting or investigating grading issues. I find it questionable that Fulnecky didn't, say, send an email, offer to discuss it in office hours, or speak to the U of O's office of institutional standards, or whatever they call it there.

To try and address as many of your pointed rhetorical questions as possible in one fell swoop,

They were not rhetorical. Sharp, yes, but not rhetorical. Your answers, please, because your comments below avoided rather than answered them.

my view is that Fulnecky should have known better than to submit an assignment with this sort of argumentation, especially as a junior.

By what standard?

This is not a rhetorical question- this is a crux of the issue. If there is no agreed upon or mutually acceptable standard by which Fulnecky should be judged, there is no reason to not dismiss or act against those who would try to impose one at the expense of her or others who might find themselves at odds with it. There is no scissor statement involved with opposing a who-whom abuse, nor

The methods used in the field of academic psychology are specific and any deviation from them, especially a major one like this, requires some justification.

Again, by what standard?

You have not made the argument that her methods would self-evidently fail in the field, let alone by the standards of the course work. You have assumed a conclusion without justifying it, and used that to blame a victim by no clear standard.

Learning to work in a field involves learning to speak its language, to participate in the academic community. Perhaps other professors have let it slide but I do not fault this instructor for not doing so.

For a third time- by what standard?

Whether you do not fault the graduate student may only an indication of your inclination to side with politically favorable punishments along a who-whom axis. A way to demonstrate against that is a consistent standard, and to not arbitrarily punish people for violating the standards you wish were established but do not violate standards that are established.

For someone to break a rule, there must actually be a rule.

The rubric, especially for such a small potatoes assignment like this, need not state every single possibility nor are there really objective criteria.

It does and there are, or else it is not a rubric nor a reason to detract points.

Plenty of professors give out zeroes for less,

Please identify the plenty of professors at the university in question who do. American universities are notorious for their grade inflation, not their grade negation.

and my quickly jotted belief that she deserves "some points" is just because I hate to see any student get a zero for an assignment they at least submitted. They hurt. But that doesn't mean a 0 wasn't deserved.

It absolutely does, unless there is a standard by which a 0 would have been deserved.

I am speaking of this event as suspicious because there are ways it could have been handled other than immediately rushing to a political advocacy group.

Would they have been as effective, timely, and as deterring against future political prejudice as going to a political advocacy group who could be trusted to not bury it?

Most universities have mechanisms for reporting or investigating grading issues. I find it questionable that Fulnecky didn't, say, send an email, offer to discuss it in office hours, or speak to the U of O's office of institutional standards, or whatever they call it there.

Is there a non-motivated reason to believe that is a good question to have?

By your own account, Fulnecky was subject to an arbitrary retaliation by the official representative of that institution, who in turn felt confident enough in her position to do so and provide a publicly-releasable justification. That institution in turn would have many incentives to try to downplay, hide, and otherwise minimize any public awareness of the incident, as demonstrated by many other downplays/dismissals/etc. over the last quarter century.

It may well be in an abuser's interest to have the institution they are a part of investigate itself, and even in the interest of those more sympathetic of the abuser than the abused, but there is no obligation of a target of abuse to put the abuser's interests above their own.

I’m more than willing to concede that arguing biblical inerrancy is so far outside of the mainstream in psych that it might as well be astrology (which would probably be better received).

At the same time, fields often develop a specific set of “rules” that appear to be academic but are blind faith — similar to the faith in biblical inerrancy.

Unfortunately, I don't have the bandwidth or time to argue in the didactic, premise-driven way you'd like me to. Let's use the "reasonable person" standard here. Do you think the final paragraph of the essay is reasonably in accordance with the standards of writing in undergraduate academic psychology? My answer is no. If you share your thoughts on that paragraph, perhaps we can inch closer to a shared vocabulary here.

I think going to the institutional office would be effective in getting the grade changed, or at least bring more clarity and consistency, yes. I suppose I have trust in that sort of thing. It would be corrective to the extent that the graduate student would be more responsible going forward and likely illustrate to Fulnecky where her writing could improve.

Unfortunately, I don't have the bandwidth or time to argue in the didactic, premise-driven way you'd like me to.

Unreasonable and arbitrary standards are usually trotted out for convenience, true.

Let's use the "reasonable person" standard here. Do you think the final paragraph of the essay is reasonably in accordance with the standards of writing in undergraduate academic psychology? My answer is no. If you share your thoughts on that paragraph, perhaps we can inch closer to a shared vocabulary here.

Sure. My answer is 'you have not provided an established standard by which it is not in accordance.' It is also exceedingly unreasonable to use a position of authority to formally punish people for something that is not against the rules. The actual material of the paragraph is immaterial- if it is not forbidden, it is unreasonable to punish it as if it were forbidden.

I think going to the institutional office would be effective in getting the grade changed, or at least bring more clarity and consistency, yes.

Why should you think that, given the plethora of examples of the American culture war in universities including open discrimination by institutional offices against red-tribe-coded faculty and students?

I suppose I have trust in that sort of thing.

Should neutral observers believe your trust in that sort of thing is warranted or indicative of good judgement, given the last decades of American culture war observations and admissions in American academia?

It would be corrective to the extent that the graduate student would be more responsible going forward and likely illustrate to Fulnecky where her writing could improve.

Why do you believe the graduate student would be more responsible going forward under a course of action with a long and contemporary history of American academic institutions discriminating in favor of the graduate student's preferences and practices?

Sure. My answer is 'you have not provided an established standard by which it is not in accordance.' It is also exceedingly unreasonable to use a position of authority to formally punish people for something that is not against the rules. The actual material of the paragraph is immaterial- if it is not forbidden, it is unreasonable to punish it as if it were forbidden.

Are you making a positive claim that academic evaluations do not, or ought not, incorporate normative expectations of domain relevancy? This feels like an untenable position; can you point to another equivalent domain of human interaction where such a positive claim would be supported? I can't imagine a high school calculus teacher accepting "because my mom told me so" as an acceptable answer in a proof whether or not the syllabus explicitly stipulated mathematical reasoning as a grading requirement. Most people don't begin asking a stranger on the street for directions with an explicit enumeration of acceptable sources of knowledge yet would be unnerved if informed the source came from a dream.

In any case, virtually every university student handbook will identify the purpose of education and grades as being for the purpose of learning. This doesn't mean just in a generalized sense but also in the specifics of learning a topic. Unless otherwise stated, calculus class is offered with the intention of teaching students calculus. This is usually identified under a section like "Academic Integrity" because it clarifies exactly this question: this is not a free for all. It might just be easier to look at OU's Academic Integrity language:

  1. Students attend the University of Oklahoma in order to learn and grow intellectually.
  2. Academic assignments exist for the sake of this goal and grades exist to show how fully the goal is attained.

https://studenthandbook.ouhsc.edu/hbSections.aspx?ID=430

Arguing about the biblical implications of a psychological claim does not provide any evidence of the students learning or growth in the field of psychology and consequently does not satisfy the academic integrity requirements of the university.

Students are obligated to read, understand, and agree to the terms in the handbook every year by the way.

Are you making a positive claim that academic evaluations do not, or ought not, incorporate normative expectations of domain relevancy?

No. I am making the claim I actually made. Since you quoted it, I'll spare you the re-citation.

Welcome to the Motte, by the way. I am flattered you made your first comment of this account to engage with me in particular. I look forward to your long and consistent posting record going forward.

This feels like an untenable position; can you point to another equivalent domain of human interaction where such a positive claim would be supported?

The point I did make on it being unreasonable to punish people for a standard not established? Trivially- as should you.

If you want to make any appeal to normative expectations, a bedrock principle of conflict resolution and the application of rules is an odd one to feign ignorance of.

I can't imagine a high school calculus teacher accepting "because my mom told me so" as an acceptable answer in a proof whether or not the syllabus explicitly stipulated mathematical reasoning as a grading requirement. Most people don't begin asking a stranger on the street for directions with an explicit enumeration of acceptable sources of knowledge yet would be unnerved if informed the source came from a dream.

Possibly you cannot imagine it because these are non-equivalent scenarios deliberately framed to be ridiculous. There is a reason you start with a scenario in which there is an objective correct position to have such that a deviation is a failure, just as there is a reason that neither scenario reflects the format of an open-ended position-agnostic assignment that is grading for structure.

Arguing about the biblical implications of a psychological claim does not provide any evidence of the students learning or growth in the field of psychology and consequently does not satisfy the academic integrity requirements of the university.

The later does not follow from the former, particularly when the former rests on false premises.

By its nature, being able to argue about the biblical implications of a psychological claim already demonstrates that the student has learned enough about the psychological claim to link it to a major social / cultural / societal effect influencing the psychology of billions of people. This, in turn, demonstrates growth in the field of psychology, as someone without such growth would not have been able to identify, apply, and discuss the link.

You may dismiss the link, you may deny the link, but growth in understanding in the field of psychology does not depend on your approval of the link.

Students are obligated to read, understand, and agree to the terms in the handbook every year by the way.

Hence why the graduate grader appealed to other factors to justify their arbitrary decision to ignore the rubric they were supposed to grade by. A standard which they agree to apply every time they agree to take on the course and issue it to their students.

I am as familiar with the practice of searching for another excuse to justify the abuse as you. I am also familiar with its limitations towards the misdeeds of the adjudicator.

No. I am making the claim I actually made.

A more fruitful response would have attempted to delineate some difference between the claim you intended and the claim as it reads. I quoted you directly

It is also exceedingly unreasonable to use a position of authority to formally punish people for something that is not against the rules

The "punishment" you're referring to in this context is the assigned grade, and this line is a quote response to the question

Do you think the final paragraph of the essay is reasonably in accordance with the standards of writing in undergraduate academic psychology?

Making you appear to be responding to the notion that standards exist beyond those explicitly outlined among some set of specifically delineated "rules" (most likely the formal rubric). In other words this is a positive assertion that

Academic evaluations {e.g. grades} do not {...} incorporate normative expectations of domain relevancy {e.g. standards beyond those identified as rules}

If this is not what you intend, you should be more clear.

Possibly you cannot imagine it because these are non-equivalent scenarios deliberately framed to be ridiculous.

You're welcome to make an argument.

By its nature, being able to argue about the biblical implications of a psychological claim already demonstrates that the student has learned enough about the psychological claim to link it to a major social / cultural / societal effect influencing the psychology of billions of people.

This is confused on a few counts. First, comprehending the implications of a conclusion implies no necessary understanding of the arguments which lead to the conclusion. These are two wholly distinct domains of knowledge. Second, the issue in this case is not identifying the existence of "biblical implications of a psychological claim" but rather making a claim about psychology on the basis of biblical premises. Biblical evidence is not itself scientific in nature and consequently does not form a rational basis for scientific claims.

I am also familiar with its limitations towards the misdeeds of the adjudicator.

The student shouldn't have been given a zero my prior is strongly in favor of the position that the grader's decision to award no points rather than whatever the rubrik assigned was politically motivated.

However, if you are rejecting the question

Do you think the final paragraph of the essay is reasonably in accordance with the standards of writing in undergraduate academic psychology?

On the basis that such considerations would constitute an "unreasonable" application of authority to "formally punish people for something that is not against the rules."

Then you're incorrect both in general and in these particulars.

You are asking me to articulate the academic standards of psychology from first principles. I respect your demands for rigor and honestly I'd enjoy such a discussion. I simply don't have the argumentative skill, time, or knowledge in epistemology to do that. However, it seems self-evident to me that discussing matters of God is not a valid truth-claim in psychology especially as a response to another article. It's somewhat common-sense within the profession and I'm not sure I could even find an explicit statement of it in an academic text. It's hard to draw the line exactly but it's easy to know when it's been crossed - hence my reference to the reasonable person's standard. If you disagree then I would rather hear your counterargument, affirmatively stated, instead of continued needling.

It is true that institutions fail students and play "culture warrior" at times, but I suppose I would have rather Fulnecky started by going to her school instead of immediately escalating. For every controversy we hear about, there are many more cases that go successfully resolved. Especially because the instructor is an untenured grad student, it is reasonable that the school could've sided with Fulnecky. Graduate students are not gods in academia the way tenured profs are.

It's somewhat common-sense within the profession and I'm not sure I could even find an explicit statement of it in an academic text.

Then the profession's common-sense may far less imbued with beneficent academic rigor than commonly perceived, and so be less deserving of public trust and deference. The social sciences do struggle with this, and deservedly so with the replication crisis of the things that do find their ways into academic texts.

On the other hand, I could find explicit statements in academic texts of how arbitrary and even retroactive application of rules is unjust in an ethical sense and bad policy from a professional sense. I could also find academic texts of how professional gain public trust and deference from being self-regulating, and how efforts to circle the wagons around a colleague who abuses their position from within the profession loses that public trust and deference that separates a profession from a mere line of work.

If you disagree then I would rather hear your counterargument, affirmatively stated, instead of continued needling.

I already have, and you continue to evade and excuse rather than address: it is unreasonable to punish people according to a standard which is not established.

If you will not stand by or take the time to defend the opposite from first principles, or even second, why should others give you yet another argument to to pick at tertiary principles? The first were already more than enough to cause you to flee both the motte and the bailey.

It is true that institutions fail students and play "culture warrior" at times, but I suppose I would have rather Fulnecky started by going to her school instead of immediately escalating. For every controversy we hear about, there are many more cases that go successfully resolved.

That you would prefer the victim to play by the preferred rules of the abuser is clear, but not a compelling reason to defer to. Particularly when you started your OP with rather unsubtle contempt for the victim in question, and used it to make an outgroup swipe for a lack of deference you've avoided every challenge to justify deserving it.

That you are attempting to smuggle in an appeal to an unfalsifiable majority is of no consequence. I could just as easily say 'for every case that goes successfully resolved, there are even more that go unsuccessfully resolved where the abuse stands.' You might challenge it, and I might raise the decline of conservatives in academia over time and the admissions of ideological discrimination as supporting evidence, but it would remain just as fallacious an appeal.

Especially because the instructor is an untenured grad student, it is reasonable that the school could've sided with Fulnecky. Graduate students are not gods in academia the way tenured profs are.

And they are not gods because when they try to play as such by imposing their own personal politics in lieu of objective standards, they find they can be crucified in the court of public and political opinion and not be the beneficiaries of higher intervention.

It is a salutary lesson for untenured grad students everywhere, and more likely need to learn it if they are to overcome the institutional rot and collapse of professional reputation their tenured professors have cultivated for them to inherit.

I see. I get the sense that we might not see eye to eye but I'll give it one more go. Please give me some charity here with my phrasing - I'm in a rush.

You are concerned about improper application of authority and the negative consequences involved when applying rules selectively, arbitrarily, or in the case that the rules have been not stated. I agree with this, believe it or not.

My response was that the rule of "do not appeal solely to Scripture to support a truth-claim in psychology" is not explicitly stated because it is widely understood. A text may exist somewhere that states it, but that text is not commonly assigned or propagated because the rule is the sum total of hundreds of years of epistemology and philosophy. It is foundational to the methods of psychology. I'm sure it exists but I can't easily locate it because it's such a widely held but diffuse belief. While it would be nice for this rule to be explicitly stated often, it usually isn't because doing so would be seen as unnecessary. At most, the APA encourages "evidence-based" practice and responsible data standards, which are usually hammered in during a research methods course. Fulnecky likely took this course, as she is a junior. She would have known. There is room for Scripture in psychology, but it would be more palatable if it was accompanied by appropriate argumentation.

For Fulnecky to have made it to her junior year and not understand this represents a significant failure in some way. So significant, in fact, I am suspicious of her immediate choice to run to the media. I reject your framing of abuser-abised, as there is no evidence Fulnecky had a compromised relationship with the school. Again, if she tried the usual channels and was met with a corrupt response, then it would be more prudent to go to the media. I just think the school should have been given the benefit of the doubt.

I respect your passion and commitment to standards of rigor.

I have a hard time imagining anyone reading her essay and thinking it's actually good--more precisely, to avoid consensus building, I'd assume anyone who defended it has such a radically different conception of what a university education should look like that we likely wouldn't have much to say to each other. I also don't think it's intentionally poorly written: you could write a significantly better version of it while taking the same line and and still manage to score a 0, which would be more effective for outrage mongering.

What would be useful is to know what the other essays that scored higher look like. Students at many universities struggle even with basic grammar, let alone knowing how to make a strong argument. I would expect that at least one student wrote equally bad pablum of a progressive flavor and got a passing grade; but, there's no way to verify that, because students don't complain when they're given an unjustifiably high score.

Should we care, though? If we see universities as credential mills, yes; dumb conservative students face discrimination that dumb progressives don't, which impacts scholarships, graduation rates and times, etc. But if we aspire for universities to educate and improve human capital, then we shouldn't. In that case, to the extent that anyone is being harmed by the grading, it's the progressive students who are getting more screwed here, because they're not getting feedback to improve (Fulnecky is at least getting a coarse signal).

What would be useful is to know what the other essays that scored higher look like. Students at many universities struggle even with basic grammar, let alone knowing how to make a strong argument.

I'd like to know this too. Given her mother is a lawyer, I wonder if it's surprisingly about on par or no worse than others'. (Apart from citing the Bible.)

I have not yet read it, but do suspect something punitive given how rare it is to get an actual 0, the worst kind of F you can possibly get, if you've turned in something of adequate length and effort. This isn't failing to turn anything in at all, or just your name a title.

I think this exactly. It’s not good but other east’s of equally poor quality likely received passing grades. But nobody can prove it either way. So in essence arguing the object level is meaningless.

It seems likely that this essay was a trap. If so, it worked.

This is the assignment. It breaks the grade down into three sections.

10 points: Is there a clear link back to the assigned article? Can the reader assess whether the student has read the assigned article?

10 points: Does the paper provide a reaction/reflection/discussion of some aspect of the article, rather than a summary?

5 points: Are the main ideas and thoughts organized into a coherent discussion? Is the writing clear enough to follow without multiple re-readings?

This is the paper.

There are links back to the assigned article. They're pretty weak, but they're not zero. The paper is clearly NOT a summary and IS providing a reaction/reflection/discussion of some aspect of the article. The organization is poor but not non-existent. This article clearly does not deserve a zero by the rubric given -- I would say it deserves at least 12 points, full points for the second item and a minimum of one point for the other two. Thus, the zero was given as punishment and not fair grading. And the claim “Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs” is almost certainly a lie.

This is further evidence to me that red-tribers have completely abandoned most institutes of higher education. It's no longer a question of "we must reform the universities and stop them from being ideologically possessed!" but "the universities are ideologically possessed and the only way out is avoidance/destruction."

Just the opposite. This is a red-tribe student within the university attempting to obtain change from within.

And the claim “Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs” is almost certainly a lie.

Yea. Though more optimistically, I had an English social democrat-style professor in college who gave me a 100 on an essay defending propertarianism or "plumb-line" libertarianism. I cited Hoppe's argumentation ethics and he thought it was rather clever and novel. He maintained his views of course - and I've since shed most of the views in that paper - but my prof was able to appreciate a well-structured, at least internally valid argument. Mutual respect.

I had a history professor whose stated policy was, "I'm going to give you my views on X. You can absolutely get a good grade on the tests by just arguing in favor of my views, using what I told you in class. You can get just as good of a grade by arguing that I'm wrong. I just care that you support whichever answer you go with, and do it well."

Going by the rubric, she clearly deserved significantly more than a 0.

But it's a terrible rubric, and the goal shouldn't be applying shockingly low standards to all students fairly, but to apply reasonable academic standards fairly. If successful, this red-tribe push is far more likely to just further hollow out American universities as glorified daycare for post-teens than it is to get reasonable standards applied fairly.

Though, I can see an argument that universities are already doomed, so might as well accelerate the collapse so that something better can take their place.

Who the hell is pushing for higher standards and more rigor at universities? Literally who? Like that's not going to happen. And state schools in flyover aren't going to be leading the charge on that even if you get a genie out of a bottle.

Right, but the people dunking on the quality of this essay are just out of touch with how debased the standards are. Its a pretty average freshman essay whether this girl was at a directional state U or Princeton. The fact is high schools simply do not teach writing well. And the universities aren't really either. If something of that level was in a law school application I wouldn't be surprised. In fact, the only thing surprising is the notable lack of AI slop tells. And so progressives dunking on her writing are really just dunking on themselves, as public and higher education are two of their biggest and longest going projects.

Who the hell is pushing for higher standards and more rigor at universities?

Based on this thread, roughly two people on this entire site while two dozen think an attempt at doing that was grounds for dismissal. I”d liike to say I’m shocked but this isn’t the exactly the first or even the twentieth time people here have argued in simular vein.

The TA was not trying to apply consistent academic standards to everyone. The TA was punished for failing to apply consistent academic standards to everyone!

To my friends, anything. To my enemies, the law.

I think none of the people involved in this story should have been anywhere near a university education. This paltry assignment, the nauseating submission, the insane grading standard, even the "research" that prompted it. None of this is scholarship. It's posing as such, but quite literally none of this is creating anything approximating the furtherance of human knowledge. And I say this as someone that at least recognizes psychology as a very useful and meritorious discipline when done rigorously.

The correct and unthinkable course of action is to stop letting this sort of people attend universities, let alone teach at them, and kick them back into the pamphleteer masses where they belong instead of pretending politics and truth can be consorts. How's that for raising standards?

False. You are making a clear logical error. Most of the posts aren’t saying “lower standards.” Indeed most don’t address what the standard ought to be. Instead, they are saying the current standard is being applied unevenly.

I think rightfully her paper should get an F (though she is hot so you know D-). But I think there are probably a lot of grades that should be Fs. If you only want high standards for views you don’t like, that isn’t rigor but an isolated demand for one.

False. You are making a clear logical error. Most of the posts aren’t saying “lower standards.” Indeed most don’t address what the standard ought to be. Instead, they are saying the current standard is being applied unevenly.

Strongly agree. I think most here would be heavily in favor of nuking 90% of the university system and enforcing extremely high standards in what remains.

It can't be the first time, or any time, because it just doesn't fit the criteria for being an instance of the general case you claim it fits into.

Where did anyone argue against increasing standards? Where did anyone even show that the discussed case was an attempt at increasing standards to begin with?

It's a specific case of a general "argument" against a harsh policy -- "well, how about we apply this harsh policy to you and yours only, how do you like that?"

I'm reminded of when I was in grade school, my mother demanded to speak with a teacher (known to dislike me) over an assignment I received a "C" on. Not because I'd been graded unfairly, but because it was a multi-part assignment, and I'd received "C"s for every individual part of it... including the part I hadn't done at all. My mom's fury wasn't over a low grade, but that the grade had nothing to do with the quality of the work I had or hadn't done, and was simply because the teacher jumped straight to marking it all "C" because she didn't like me (but presumably expected a "D" or a failure to bring pushback, given my grades from other teachers).

When faced with this, the teacher's immediate response (with a fellow teacher in the room!) was to ask, "well, what grade do you want me to give, then?" in the assumption that having arbitrarily given me a poor grade because she disliked me, my mother would be satisfied with an arbitrary good grade to make up for it--yet another mistake by that teacher.

Sure, it's a terrible rubric. Most likely this class simply shouldn't exist. It's probably being used for political indoctrination.

I respect your logic but have to disagree with the reading of the rubric. As someone who has completed plenty of similar reflection paper assignments during my time in college, the rubrics are boilerplate and vague but imply some pretty specific meanings. I want to hone in on the second point:

Does the paper provide a reaction/reflection/discussion of some aspect of the article, rather than the summary.

In my experience, the key word here is "some aspect." This usually implies a citation or reference to a specific point made by the article, usually in the form of a quoted argument. Really, this is just to prove you internalized some point from the paper. A reading check. As far as I can tell, Fulnecky didn't do this and instead discusses the concept of "gender" in its entirety, whereas the article was very narrow in its scope. Her essay wasn't a summary, but it was hardly specific, nor did it reference findings from the article. Should a citation have been specified in the rubric as a requirement? Sure. But, personally, it goes without saying. I have received a zero or two on reflection assignments for similarly bureaucratic concerns. Live and learn.

Ultimately we are both going to have to fill in the blanks as to what the "proper" interpretation of the rubric is. I suppose it comes down to who you trust to interpret the rubric properly - the instructor or Fulnecky. In this case, I have to give a little deference to the professor, because she created the rubric and I've experienced similar grading standards in the past. I suppose this sort of thing is what the University is interested in finding out.

Just the opposite. This is a red-tribe student within the university attempting to obtain change from within.

Perhaps those are Fulnecky's motivations, though the greater media response has been more aggressive from what I've seen. I am suspicious that she took it to the media for such a small and inconsequential assignment. The more conventional action would be appealing your grade to the dean.

Then the student should get at least some of the first 10 points simply for demonstrating that she read at least some of the article. And even though the writing is pretty poor, it's not bad enough to warrant a 0 on the third item. Based on the rubric 0 is entirely unjustifiable.

Ultimately we are both going to have to fill in the blanks as to what the "proper" interpretation of the rubric is. I suppose it comes down to who you trust to interpret the rubric properly - the instructor or Fulnecky. In this case, I have to give a little deference to the professor, because she created the rubric and I've experienced similar grading standards in the past. I suppose this sort of thing is what the University is interested in finding out.

I agree with all of this. My problem is I just don't have any confidence that these kinds of standards are applied in a consistent manner, and I don't have any particular reason to trust this particular instructor any more than I trust the rest of University administration, which is not at all. I will never, ever, forget how much this story about a University essay crushed me: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teen-accepted-stanford-after-writing-blacklivesmatter-100-times-application-n742586

I will never, ever, forget how much this story about a University essay crushed me: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teen-accepted-stanford-after-writing-blacklivesmatter-100-times-application-n742586

So basically just Zhang Tiesheng, but for wokeness instead of communism?

To (reluctantly) be fair, the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort. Writing BlackLivesMatter over and over again on his application was cheap rhetoric but it was in response to a specific question on his application rather than an essay:

In response to a question asking “What matters to you, and why?" the teen wrote "#BlackLivesMatter" exactly 100 times.

it's not literally all he had going for him.

Stanford didn't just accept some total rando because he wrote Black Live Matter.

IOW, he completely ignored the "and why?" portion of the cue and got in anyway? Thanks, I had never heard that part of the story before.

For better and worse, university admissions often play pretty fast and loose. The admissions questions are jumping-off points for you to persuade the university that you're interesting and a good long-term investment. They're not a points-based assessment, especially not somewhere like Stanford, and this guy would surely have known that.

In the UK, Oxford has a reputation for having much more interview-based admissions based (in theory) on future potential and interestingness, whereas Cambridge admissions have the reputation of being much more reliant on strict grade ranking and standardised testing. Neither of them is considered a clear winner and both strategies appear to have their pros and cons.

the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort

The high grades are relevant, the rest of it is padding that should have been ignored (Obama let that kid with the clock/bomb visit the White House, getting to visit Obama in the White House was not a mark of distinction).

He wrote something stupid for an essay (did not fill in the part about "why does this matter to you?") and so should have been failed. If he was academically able to follow the instructions and produce a readable essay, as the high grades would argue, this is rubbish that is unacceptable as any kind of class work much less an application for a place to a selective university.

I have met and disliked these people before, so I mostly agree with your position. However my understanding is that American top-level universities have always seen their job as being 'identify, gather and acculturate future influential people' and whether you or I like it or not, I'm pretty sure that this guy is legitimately the kind of guy they want and that their admissions system is designed to identify.

Admissions questions aren't essays, and often aren't marked by a rubric. They're prompts designed to ferret out, 'are you the kind of guy we want?' and I'm pretty sure he would have got in with or without daddy's deep pockets and BLM.

To (reluctantly) be fair, the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort.

He also happens to be the son of Shakil Ahmed, a rather big deal formerly of Morgan Stanley.

Daddy's deep pockets as possible future donor sealed the deal, then?

That's my assumption. He probably could've smeared feces on the application and gotten in.

Her essay wasn't a summary, but it was hardly specific, nor did it reference findings from the article. Should a citation have been specified in the rubric as a requirement? Sure. But, personally, it goes without saying.

It doesn't go without saying. At this point you're justifying not just a low score but a zero on a section of the grading based on a criterion which didn't appear, in which case why provide a rubric at all?

The criterion does appear, in the statement "some aspect." Fulnecky did not address a specific argument (aspect) that the article advances. This, in my experience, is a very common expectation. You are overestimating the degree to which grad student instructors and even full tenured profs are surgically specific in the way they construct rubrics - plenty goes unsaid. I will concede that my interpretation is not definitive, but the professors comments suggest that the grade was related to this lack of specific argumentation.

At this point you're insisting a vague term ('some aspect') means something very specific (there must be a citation to the specific part of the article being reacted to). I simply don't believe this.

I'm not saying it needs to be an APA-consistent academic citation. I just mean she needs to mention some particular detail from the article, which she does not. This interpretation seems most likely to me in light of my experiences with these assignments. They are basically reading checks, and the professor would not be mistaken for thinking Fulnecky didn't read the article at all. We may just not see eye-to-eye on how to read this thing. Cheers.

Doesn’t she mention the article assumes teasing creates gender roles but she thinks gender rules are created by God? Seems like she is addressing a specific point.

To properly assess it, we sadly need other essays from the class. Did similar levels of progressive pap get a C+? What did the A essays look like?

I can't imagine what a similarly-constructed paper from a progressive view would even look like. The only half-decent analogue I can think of is if the progressive response contained poorly cited infographic statistics, in which case it would at least gesture toward empiricism and the ways of knowing endorsed by the psychological sciences. I think Fulnecky has a greater intellectual burden than a similarly-abled progressive student to justify her choice to appeal to the Bible, which defies the conventions of the field. She did not meet that burden.

  • -15

It's because of the evil white man that kids are brainwashed into teasing to enforce gender norms. We must empower Black and Brown Queer youth to smash fascism and dismantle patriarchy

The progressive reverse to this essay appealing to Biblical inerrancy is an essay appealing to narcissistic, naval-gazing identity-having. I would be surprised if there were zero students in that class who functionally just vomited two pages worth of "AS A BLANK, THIS ARTICLE MADE ME FEEL THAT" - but not as shocked as I would be if one of them were graded harshly.

I can't imagine what a similarly-constructed paper from a progressive view would even look like. The only half-decent analogue I can think of is if the progressive response contained poorly cited infographic statistics, in which case it would at least gesture toward empiricism and the ways of knowing endorsed by the psychological sciences.

We did have recent Darwin discourse, if you want in-the-wild examples.

I'm not sure that 'the ways of knowing endorsed by the pyschological sciences' are anywhere near what you want to motion toward as a different class of thing, or that it's clear from either the rubric or the typical essay in this category of course that such empiricism is actually supported or required, given the quality of academic psychological research. Maybe if schools weren't treated the Stanford Prison Experiment like a real experiment rather than a play it would have bite.

But ignoring that for now, there's a lot of pretty well-regarded sources that are respected in modern psychology and have little more than ipse dixit behind them. I'm extremely skeptical that a writer pulling from Julia Serano to talk about trans rights would have gotten this style of response, but they've got about the same experimental foundation.

That's... kinda the problem. If the quality of thought and writing from the graduates of these programs were better, you could just motion about this slop being slop. But then you look at the professor's response, and it's not like it's doing any better, either! Look at the middle lead from the professor:

You argue that abiding by normative gender roles is beneficial (it is perfectly fine to believe this), but to then say that everyone should act the same, while also saying that people aren't pressured into gendered expectations is contradictory, especially since your arguments reflect a religious pressure to act in gender-stereotypical ways. You can say that strict gender norms don't create gender stereotypes, but that isn't true by definition of what a stereotype is. Please note that acknowledging gender stereotypes does not immediately denote a negative connotation, a nuance this article discusses.

There's a lot of this whole disagreement that makes me want to slap everyone involved -- including the student -- in the face with an embossed copy of "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition", and I get that a) they probably haven't read it, and b) the professor has to write comments on a lot of bad essays and is only getting in national news for the worst. But look at that claim, and compare:

Gender roles and tendencies should not be considered “stereotypes”. Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men. God created men in the image of His courage and strength, and He created women in the image of His beauty. He intentionally created women differently than men and we should live our lives with that in mind....

Gender roles and tendencies should not be considered “stereotypes”. Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men. God created men in the image of His courage and strength, and He created women in the image of His beauty. He intentionally created women differently than men and we should live our lives with that in mind.

Yes, this is just ipse dixit and incompetently written, but it's not making the argument that the professor is criticizing; to rephrase it in left-friendly terms the student's argument is that a lot of what people present as the result of stereotypes are really underlying interests (aka the Damore), and people would enjoy their lives better if they were allowed to act in alignment with those goals. This might be (almost certainly is) wrong! But it's not the same as "to say everyone should act the same". Worse, the professor's contradiction between "everyone should act the same" and "while also saying that people aren't pressured into gendered expectations" is a textbook philosophy error.

Or, later, compare the professor's:

Additionally, to call an entire group of people "demonic" is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population." You are entitled to your own belief, 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.

to

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 latter is written very poorly, so for a casual reader, the confusion is understandable. But diagram the sentence out. "Society pushing the lie" "is" "[D]emonic", not an entire group of people. There's a fair critique that the student isn't engaging with the argument being presented, but in turn, it's undermined if the academic measuring this stuff can't do much better.

Agreed. I'm definitely not an "empiricism above all else" sort of person, especially regarding psychology. Forgive me for the sloppiness. I guess when I say "ways of knowing" I simply mean that Fulnecky's appeal to the Bible is generally not considered a valid truth claim in the field of psychology. Saying that "God gave women womanly desires" is incomprehensible with the vocabulary of psychology. Plenty of concepts in psychology are a bit fluffy on the empiricism, no doubt, but they are at least arrived at from some case study or line of reasoning. I do wonder what would have happened if Fulnecky laid out her reasoning neatly, in the "proper way," and still expressed the same viewpoint, but that's not a counterfactual we have access to. The instructor here is not a bastion of neat argumentation either and is reading the paper a bit uncharitably, but I think overall the critique, that the response is without grounding in psychology, stands.

"God gave women womanly desires" is incomprehensible with the vocabulary of psychology.

With a little bit of critical thinking you can tell it's the equivalent to "women are born with" or "women are innately inclined towards". Of course the obfuscation is not ideal but if you actually engage with the work it has a meaning from a psychological perspective.

In general the mainstream christian views on science don't believe that god has a personal involvement in reproduction. They believe that god created life with intelligent design, but biology, chromosomes, eggs and sperm ... heck even natural selection and evolution are all real phenomenon that stem from god's original design.

In general the mainstream christian views on science don't believe that god has a personal involvement in reproduction. They believe that god created life with intelligent design, but biology, chromosomes, eggs and sperm ... heck even natural selection and evolution are all real phenomenon that stem from god's original design.

That's true where the fleshy aspect of sexuality is concerned, but when we start talking about desires and personality, I do suspect a plurality of mainstream Christians are mind-body dualists of one sort of another, and would balk at the idea that love and desires are purely a matter of physical chemicals sloshing around in a physical brain, albeit a brain intelligent-designed by God. They'd say that this stuff happens in the Soul, which is Mysterious.

(I don't say this to score cheap shots or boo-outgroup. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Hard, dualism is a perfectly respectable position with or without theism, even if it's not mine.)

I suspect most people are mind body dualist.

For sure - the claim "women are innately driven toward XYZ," is not one I take tremendous issue with. However, the metaphysics implied in the specific statement "God gave women womanly desires" is then used throughout the rest of Fulnecky's response to justify the argument that deviating from gender norms is detrimental because it defies God's will, to negative spiritual and social consequences. That does not seem to me to be easily or responsibly "translated" into academically validated psych-speak.

You keep talking about what is considered a valid truth claim within psychology as if that’s meaningful.

First, fields can be wrong. Appealing to consensus is bad form.

Second, psychology is a bullshit field. Most of the famous theories don’t hold up to scrutiny. With respect to gender, most of the literature is just bullshit ipsie dixit. Besides many arguments not raving being empirical, the empirical studies are riddled with failure to replicate or publication bias. Even the NYT acknowledged that WPATH was hiding studies that cast doubt on trans agenda.

So the professor is literally casting stones from a glass house. But alas, I think the professor is probably too retarded to even know that. There was a massive logical error in literally every sentence the professor wrote. The university should fire her for being so stupid.

PS the paper sucked but probably sucked about the same as a number of other papers.

Just speaking personally, and airing my elitism, I haven't written an essay that bad since at least middle school, just from a writing perspective. But I didn't go to Oklahoma. I don't know what the other essays looked like.

If they looked like essays I've written, then she deserved the zero. If they all sound like that but said gender is socially constructed, she didn't deserve a zero.

Any other argument about the quality of the essay lacks rigor.

Just speaking personally, and airing my elitism, I haven't written an essay that bad since at least middle school, just from a writing perspective. But I didn't go to Oklahoma. I don't know what the other essays looked like.

This just means you are old, not elitist. I have to read a lot of work product of 2Ls (2nd year in law school) from kids from just about every law school in the midwest. From U-Chicago, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Iowa State, all the way down to SIU and the now defunct Valpo. The writing is abysmal, yet the GPAs remain universally high. Through some magic writing ability has cratered over the last 15 years, while GPAs in writing courses have skyrocketed!

Are the 2Ls as bad as this girl? No. But they are solidly within her trajectory.

If they looked like essays I've written, then she deserved the zero. If they all sound like that but said gender is socially constructed, she didn't deserve a zero.

Interestingly, this implies that the purpose of a grade is to rank a student among their cohort rather than to an objective standard; that if you throw a bunch of morons into a university-level class, you curve scale and give an A to the best of them rather than just fail them all.

Empirically, this seems to be exactly what happens, but it leads to grade and credential inflation as ever more unprepared students are sent off to college; just another institution to spend 4 years doing pointless busywork until you get a piece of paper, high school 2.0, except that now you are four years older, 5 figures in debt, and there is not a virgin girl left among the graduates.

College delenda est.

I’m not sure curving leads to grade inflation unless the curve is quite generous. In fact, I’d expect curving to be the opposite.

It would, if the top of the class isn't what it used to be, no?

Isn’t it relative? I think you are making the case that an A is not what an A was 30 years ago. I’d agree.

My question for you is if only 10% of students could receive an A, do you think that A would more closely resemble what an A looked like 30 years compared to today or less?

I think you mean two different things by "grade inflation". On one hand, grade inflation could mean that a worse performance is given the same grade, in the same way that inflation causes the value of currency/grades to decline. On the other hand, grade inflation could mean that everyone is given higher grades, in the same way that inflation causes an increase in the overall supply of currency/grades.

Curving allows an entire class to get worse over time without their grades going down, so it causes the first kind of grade inflation. Curving also prevents a class from all getting A's, so it prevents the second kind of grade inflation.

My prediction is that the second kind of grade inflation causes the first kind of a grade inflation.

I mean it might be the University of Oklahoma, but it's still the University of Oklahoma, that is, a state flagship. It doesn't get the serious bottom of the barrel students- in the local neighborhood Texas Tech or Kansas State would be the schools notorious for graduating students who are barely literate. This isn't some HBCU or Police-Department-Requires-a-Diploma mill.

Well clearly they had one student who wrote this way, we have to see how other students wrote before we can judge whether there's politics involved in grading this essay so low.

I remember helping my dad grade essays when he was a professor, and I followed a strict rubric. The ones at the end of my grading scored much higher than the ones at the beginning (until I went back and re-graded them), because my expectations at the start were a lot higher than by the time I got to the end.

lol, reminds me of my year as a math teacher. Halfway through, I went from "I want right answers to these homework questions" to "I want to see that you tried" to "just turn in something so that I can give you a grade". That's about the time I gave up on teaching and focused on surviving until summer, when I got nonrenewed.

The mental image of a younger you thinking that being a teacher would be about teaching warms my heart.

I can't imagine what a similarly-constructed paper from a progressive view would even look like.

The obvious direct analogue would be a similarly-irrelevant appeal to the inerrancy of $OPPRESSED_MINORITY_CULTURE, in which trans and other gender identities are always considered unconditionally heckin valid

And according to the rubric, that essay would not deserve a zero either. The quality of the argument isn't even a criterion. Just... does the essay show student read the article, did the student provide a 'reaction/reflection/discussion', is it coherent? Time Cube would deserve a zero. A well-organized treatment of sports betting would deserve 5 points.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats