Becoming What They Hate

For years, professional conservatives bemoaned the "special treatment" they alleged "unqualified" liberals received on campus. Now, they demand it for students on the right.

The absolute dumbest discourse of recent weeks has taken place at the University of Oklahoma, where a conservative college student submitted an essay and cried “discrimination!”

The facts, of course, do not line up with the story.

OU student Samantha Fulnecky took a psychology course with an allegedly “transgender” professor. The professor failed Fulnecky. Here is what Turning Point USA at Oklahoma¹ had to say about it:

For a psychology course at the University Oklahoma, Samantha Fulnecky was asked to write a 650-word essay reacting to an article about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender. In her essay, Fulnecky argued that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. She cited the Bible to support her stance that eliminating gender in society would be “detrimental” because that would put people “farther from God’s original plan for humans.” She received zero points out of 25 on the essay. Transgender professor, Mel Curtis, said Ms. Fulnecky, failed to use empirical evidence/and called parts of her essay offensive. “To call an entire group of people ‘demonic’ is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population,” the instructor wrote in the online grading platform. Fulnecky says she followed the assignment guidelines and should not be penalized for her religious viewpoints. OU officials point to the formal grade-appeal process as the student awaits a decision. We at Turning Point OU stand with Samantha. We should not be letting mentally ill professors around students. Clearly this professor lacks the intellectual maturity to set her own bias aside and take grading seriously. Professors like this are the very reason conservatives can’t voice their beliefs in the classroom. Kuddos to Samantha for leading by example and standing up for what she believes in. @UofOklahoma , do better!

TPUSA at OU, unsurprisingly, gets some of the facts wrong. Like the paper was graded by a graduate assistant and not a professor, for example. You know, the basic kind of facts that determine if a story is credible or not.

But if you read Fulnecky’s essay, you will see that……….the essay is really pathetic and bad. Nor did it meet the basic instructions set out for the assignment.

Instead of accepting that she wrote a crappy paper, Fulnecky is turning this into the latest conservative outrage on the internet. It, of course, is getting traction because Fulnecky’s mom Kristi is a politician and an attorney for some January 6th putschists.

The problem with Fulnecky’s essay? It sucked. She chose not to follow the directions and general academic expectations. She did not cite the Bible, either by which version she was using, much less which Biblical citations she was referring to. She did not refer to ANY quotes from the article assigned. She did not cite non-Biblical sources to refute the article. NOR did she discuss the article’s relation to her own life experiences as assigned in the directions.

I wrote better papers than this in middle school.

I understand that the college experience is different now, but when I was at Western Maryland College² twenty-five some-odd years ago, all of my professors were varying degrees of liberal. I took their classes enthusiastically. I wrote papers on conservative topics. And guess what? I got A’s on those papers. Why? Because I could actually write, cite sources, and follow directions.

And that seems to be where Fulnecky fails. It appears she never learned how to write a paper at any point in her life, and now, instead of accepting that she does not have the skills to write a college-level paper, she screams “discrimination!” instead. Maybe she should go back to wherever she went to K-12 school and demand a refund, as they did not adequately prepare her for the real world.

What is infuriating is how groups like TPUSA and others on the conservative spectrum have, for years, complained about unfair treatment on college campuses. In some instances, there is merit in that. There have been plenty of times when student groups have been disbanded, rejected, or prohibited from holding events due to their conservative leanings. If Fulnecky had written a well-cited, well-thought-out, well-written essay on the topic and still received a 0 out of 25, I’d be right there with them talking about discrimination.

But Samantha Fulnecky appears to be a bad writer who wrote a bad essay. It demeans both conservatism and Christianity to claim discrimination when it was clearly the student herself who was responsible for her own terrible grade, and it cheapens other issues of real discrimination in public education against conservatives and Christians.

In claiming that getting a bad grade for bad writing is somehow discriminatory, conservatives are becoming what they claim to hate.

1. Becuase of course they’re involved.

2. Don’t you dare.