Ms. Samantha Fulnecky’s grade of zero that she earned on a reflection paper she submitted in a junior level University of Oklahoma psychology class has been the topic of rage du jur among higher education pundits, the right-leaning social media, and Republican officials this past week. As usual in our culture of rage, most people airing their opinions know precious little facts about the topic that is enraging them. Sadly, I have also been guilty of this, but in this case I did my homework, and for those who actually understand university level education, there is plenty of blame to go around and an opportunity for many people to learn, but as always, it’s a matter of “he that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” After 39 years in education, quite frankly, I feel entitled to air my views. Unlike Ms. Fulnecky, most of the professors jumping on social media, and probably her teaching assistant (TA), I have actually taught both middle school and university students, and I have both trained and evaluated K-12 teachers and university professors, and as a dean, I too frequently field student complaints about about faculty instruction and assessment.
I am drawing my information largely from Inside Higher Education, the Associated Press, and Fox News Digital.
I will first address the education side of this story then transition to politics and DEI.
Ms. Fulnecky’s class was asked to read and respond to this peer reviewed article (which I read): Jewell, Jennifer A. and Christia Spears Brown, “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence” Social Development 23:1, 137-156. The article is based on research (surveys) done with 11-15 years olds. The goal of the study, which was to use survey questions to unpack the relationship between perceived gender typical behaviors (or lack thereof), likeability, popularity, and mental health symptoms prominent within that age group. One cannot explain either the study design or its conclusions without using these terms: typicality, atypicality, popularity, likeability, stereotype(s)/stereotypical, or mental health.
As the title indicates, the study is about gender typical behavior, not gender identity. These are not the same. The difference between the two is particularly clear to me because on a handful of occasions others have misjudged me to be a homosexual because of my own gender atypical behaviors.
I read Ms. Fulnecky’s paper using the link to it in the 12/4/25 AP article. With the exception of the words gender and stereotype(s), Ms. Fulnecky’s paper omits virtually all of the terms one would need to use to demonstrate that they read, or better yet, actually understood the study. In any “response” paper a professor wants to be assured that the student has actually read and understood the piece they were asked to respond to. Understanding an argument must precede one’s response.
Article Keywords in article in Fulnecky’s paper
typicality 168 0
popularity 63 0
mental health 41 0
likeability 19 0
atypicality 12 0
stereotype(s)/stereotypical 45 7
Regardless of her failing to demonstrate that she actually understood the article, Ms. Fulnecky’s paper does not deserve a zero! It deserves a conversation with the TA. The zero reveals the TA’s lack of understanding of a traditional biblical anthropology, so the conversation could turn into a useful learning experience for the TA given the current political and cultural prominence of evangelical views on these matters. Further, in that conversation, Ms. Fulnecky would benefit from further mentoring in the culturally-constructed nature of gender typicality. For example, as a child, no one taught me that because I was a male intentionally created by God in His image I should exhibit physical strength and athletic prowess. And so what?! I was taught to develop my relationship with God through the Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit, learn to know His voice, and pursue what He called me to. Period. I still believe that. If I was the professor, after the conversation I would have made the rubric score work out to somewhere in D range because she submitted her required assignment in a timely manner, made a coherent argument (one of the rubric categories) consistent with her faith (sub)tradition (many Christians would disagree with her interpretations), but did not present evidence of understanding the essay’s argument or of directly responding to it . . . and she is a junior psychology major, not a freshman. Heck, a 50% could easily be justified, but a zero was just unnecessarily provocative. One caveat: I’ve said all without having even read the course syllabus or knowing how this TA has responded to other papers that share these traits.
So much more could be said about 1) how this TA could improve this assignment and its rubric, 2) the facile nature of the student’s thinking about various concepts, 3) the pretense to objectivity created by rubric-based grading, and 4) how Fulnecky contradicts herself in her essay, but space does not permit.
I was pleased to read that Ms. Fulnecky reached out to the professor after receiving her inappropriate grade, however, her next communication should have been with the department chair. Students at my institution readily figure out who that person is when they need to find them, and when student complaints end up on my provost’s or president’s desks, they appropriately push them back to the appropriate administrative level for review. As a graduate teaching assistant, this instructor is still learning how to teach, and there should be a built in oversight and mentorship process to guide them.
The fact that Ms. Fulnecky went from her TA to the university President Joseph Harroz, Jr. and Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt strongly suggests that she was relatively more interested in making a political statement than in resolving a legitimate academic concern. The fact that both the university president and the governor entertained this concern demonstrates how much they are willing to play politics with education. This is all deeply disturbing. The fact that Fulnecky chose this route of appeal is directly derivative of the toxicity of the relationship between our current political environment and higher education, but also between our current politics and other non-governmental institutions and the legitimate claims of DEI.
The DEI values that are so opposed by Trump and MAGA clearly infuses the moral presuppositions underlying the TA’s response, and that is what Ms. Fulnecky responded to, rather than her grade. She sees herself as a crusader using media, social media, and political leverage to either silence or eliminate views in public higher education that are contrary to her traditional, historical biblical anthropology. This response represents a profound misunderstanding of the function of public universities and the nature of our shared, publicly-funded civic institutions to expect a public university to silence or eliminate anti-biblical views. If students want intentionally curated exposure to non-biblical ideologies (or in some cases no exposure to them at all) they are free to choose one of the many fine private Christian universities (such as my Oklahoma alma mater, Oral Roberts University) or schools in the CCCU or IACE or ACCU (or schools too conservative to join these groups) which provide high quality education from within one of the several historic Christian traditions. This is all part of our nation’s historic commitment to each individual’s freedom of association.
On that note, I would like to end with a reflection on DEI. President Donald Trump has worked diligently, both directly and indirectly, to fulfill his campaign promise to root out all manifestations of DEI from all governmental and all government-funded institutions. But 75 million Americans voted against Trump or his agenda, and so far virtually none of them are being won over to his agenda, as best as I can tell, and only a precious few have actually left the nation. In fact, Trump’s approval is currently lower than ever, and some Republicans are beginning to worry about poor midterm showing for their party.
For all the dust up about the “MAGA movement” and Trump’s influence on American politics, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, no one has yet coined the term “MAGA revolution” or “Trump revolution,” which makes me wonder if prominent pundits are tacitly admitting that they think our current Trump-inspired populism will be a relatively short-lived political moment. After all, the term “Reagan revolution” was used during Reagan’s first year in office, and in many ways he did in fact initiate trends that endured and matured long after he left office. If Trump was truly leading some sort of enduring socio-political “revolution,” surely someone would have so named it by now. No?
I am timidly and cautiously viewing this silence as encouragement to begin to dream of a post-Trump world as the soil for a new and improved DEI 2.0 arising phoenix-like from the ashes of DEI 1.0. My fantasy is that whenever that time comes, theologians and humanities and social science scholars at explicitly evangelical universities will finally be empowered enough to play a meaningful role in birthing a DEI 2.0 appropriate for American society in general (not just Christians) that is rooted in such concepts as 1) oppression is a real thing that results from the sinful abuse of power by the powerful, 2) that sin (including racism and sexism) can become systematized and woven into social structures and produce measurably negative impacts on communities and individuals, 3) the biblical/Hebrew concepts of mishpat, sedeq, and shalom, and 4) that seeks to work independent of America’s two-party system as a “third way,” but yet influence those holding elected office. Will you dream with me? Here is my proposed framework for a “new and improved” DEI when the time is right. I dream that “DEI 2.0” will
1. reject (and reconceptualize) the premise of many critical theorists that “all oppressions (or oppressed peoples) are linked” and therefore must be treated as a unified whole. For decades, African American evangelicals like myself have been displeased by the way gender and sexuality movements have piggybacked on the political and legal legacies of the African American civil rights movement. Large numbers of those who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. would not recognize the ideology underneath much of today’s DEI/DEIA agenda, and vice versa.
2. work to build consensus around standardized definitions of such terms as racism, anti-semitism, and of DEI that is rooted in sound historical scholarship. We must stop calling people racists! We must stop saying blacks and other minorities “can’t be racists!” People are not racists; people discriminate, but systems are racist, and racism describes what we see when policies create different outcomes that correlate strongly with racial identity. Daarel Burnette II, with the Chronicle of Higher Education, observed in a College Matters podcast early this year, “DEI offices have come to mean all kinds of things.” This fact is unwieldy and harmful to the objectives of DEI, and makes legitimate concerns and protocols unnecessarily susceptible to political attack. DEI cannot mean anything people want it to mean, because then it means nothing.
3. accept human races as real manmade distinctions that our history requires us to admit exist as a social construct designed to advantage some and disadvantage others. As such, labels like “white” and “black,” do more than denote skin color (or race) as we choose to define it. History has freighted these racial terms with significantly different connotations that law and policy need to take account of again (as they did in the pre-Trump era), because those connotations have not yet disappeared from our lived experiences as black people.
4. explicitly blend the imperative for individuals to make moral choices with a critique of how power dynamics work to advantage some, and disadvantage others, based on their perceived group identity.
5. be informed by social science research about how cultures change over time. Maybe our society’s institutions can one day become predominantly meritocratic, but they never have been. We need to finally create a road map to get there, but we can’t look to our history for hints about how to create that road map, as President Trump’s 1/21/25 executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” implies.
6. develop a framework that recognizes the diversity within each racial and ethnic group
7. drill down on maximizing opportunity and access for all individuals within a given institutional space
8. greatly elevate our consideration of social class as part of informing our efforts to build a more just society
9. explicitly state that even though we can never have a utopia on earth, as God’s regents on earth, people are expected work to limit the effects of sin at the systemic level as much as at the individual level
10. radically re-conceptualize “diversity trainings” (in government and corporate America) and “diversity statements” (in higher education)
Maybe, if I’m lucky, I may live to see this world.
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