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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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