A Christian student at the University of Oklahoma has filed a complaint alleging religious discrimination — after turning in a biblically-based opinion piece that failed to meet even the basic expectations of academic work. Not borderline, not debatable: we are talking about an assignment so unmoored from the prompt that it reads less like an undergrad essay and more like a Sunday-school pamphlet.
And yet, in the upside-down contemporary world of manufactured campus outrage, this was somehow enough to trigger an administrative investigation and to place the graduate teaching assistant on leave, as though grading according to academic standards is now an actionable offense.
Let’s walk through the facts — and the farce.
What the Assignment Actually Was
The psychology class assignment was simple: a 650-word reaction to a scholarly article on how societal gender expectations shape peer relations and mental health. Students were asked to:
- demonstrate they had read the article,
- respond to its claims,
- and ground their answer in some recognizable form of psychological empirical reasoning and engagement with the research.
In other words: a basic academic exercise.
What the graduate assistant grading the assignment received instead was an opinion piece premised entirely on the student’s biblically based worldview, containing no engagement with the article whatsoever and capped with the claim that gender-affirming ideas are demonic. No evidence, no methodology, no reference to the assigned text — just theology standing in for analysis.
The University’s Response: When Institutions Fold Like Wet Paper
One might assume that a university — allegedly a home for scholarship, standards, and the occasional backbone — would defend its grading criteria against a student who plainly ignored the assignment. Instead, the teaching assistant was placed on administrative leave, and a full-time professor was brought in to reassure the aggrieved.
This is the predictable academic reflex of our time: a pre-emptive cringe before the imagined wrath of social-media activists and ideological purity brigades. Universities, terrified of becoming the next headline, cave immediately — even when their own policies were followed to the letter.
The message, whispered, but unmistakable: Better to sacrifice the TA than risk the ire of Twitter.
This is how academic integrity erodes. Not instantly, but in small capitulations — each one signaling that scholarship will be defended only until someone, somewhere, might get loud about it.
The Complaint Itself: A Masterclass in Missing the Point
Fulnecky alleges that her religious beliefs were targeted. But nothing in the feedback — which is publicly available — critiques her beliefs. It critiques her failure to answer the assignment, failure to provide evidence, and failure to engage with the material.
To frame this as religious persecution requires a level of mental gymnastics that would make even the most hardened theologian blush. It is the academic equivalent of turning in a recipe for banana bread to your calculus professor and then claiming anti-culinary discrimination when the grade is zero.
The irony is staggering: the student’s paper itself insisted that alternative gender identities are demonic, yet the student claims she is being oppressed for expressing her views. It is an ouroboros of grievance — self-devouring and self-justifying in equal measures.
The Facts, Beneath the Noise
Here’s what’s indisputable:
- The assignment required engagement with an academic article.
- The submitted essay provided none.
- The instructor graded it accordingly, following academic standards.
- The student filed a discrimination complaint.
- The university, rather than defending its own standards, suspended the grader pending review.
And here we are — with a case study in how quickly institutions will abandon rigor when confronted with the specter of outrage, even when the outrage is grounded not in principle, but in a fundamental misunderstanding of what university-level work requires.
Final Thought
This controversy is not about religious belief. It’s about the increasingly fragile ecosystem of higher education, where administrators — forever glancing nervously toward their public-relations departments — rush to appease the loudest complaint rather than uphold the most obvious standards.
As for the assignment itself: belief is no substitute for evidence, revelation no replacement for reasoning, and scripture no shield against a syllabus.
The university should have said so plainly.
