Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared on John Paul Brammer’s Substack.
As a proud graduate of the University of Oklahoma, I know firsthand that most people don’t go to college to learn how to think. For many, college is a time to experience the opposite of thought. It’s a four-year window in which the goal is to murder as many brain cells as possible with rubbing alcohol, black out, and wake up with a perfunctory diploma, a spouse, and a potbelly or a bob haircut in some suburb where an enhanced capacity to ruminate would only cause trouble.
It’s with this in mind that I feel a little bad for Samantha Fulnecky, the junior psychology major at OU currently embroiled in a national controversy of her own making. After receiving a failing grade of zero marks for her essay on the subject of stereotypes and gender roles, Fulnecky, who is Christian, claimed religious discrimination. My alma mater acted swiftly, placing the graduate assistant grader on administrative leave while it investigated.
It’s unclear what kind of investigation it needs to perform, given that Fulnecky’s 650-word essay is available for us to read and has all the textual depth of a discounted “He Is Risen” throw pillow at Hobby Lobby. I don’t feel great about bullying a college student, but, as Fulnecky herself implies in the closest she comes to an argument in her essay, bullying children is sort of okay if it contributes to a healthier society, and my personal belief is that, if we let shenanigans such as these slide, we accept an even stupider world than the drooling mess we occupy now, and, ironically, cede yet more ground to the identity-first grievance politics that Fulnecky’s supporters claim to hate so much.
Per reports, the assignment was meant to be a reflection on how gendered expectations and stereotypes can affect children. It’s a hot-button issue, and Fulnecky, though I disagree with her, takes an interesting stance, especially in the context of a college classroom: in a functioning society, it’s required to pressure children into certain norms, and while this might induce discomfort in some children, there’s a degree of strain we must deem tolerable on that front if we’re to maintain a healthy polity.
“I do not want kids to be teased or bullied in school,” she writes. “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.”
Ignoring the “not biblical” thing, this is a position most people have. We would probably not allow, for example, for a child to be racist on the grounds that racism is their truth. We would want to intervene, to correct the racist child, even if doing so brought the racist child personal discomfort, because we recognize that the world would be better off if a racist child were not racist. Shame and fear of rejection are powerful tools to mold young people into well-adapted adults. I would agree with Fulnecky that, yes, we do tell kids they can be whatever they want, and that, in practice, no, we don’t really mean that.
But Teresa of Ávila, Fulnecky is not. Though she claims to be the victim of discrimination, the only victim here is the medium of the college essay. Fulnecky doesn’t offer any quotes to support her claim. She doesn’t even quote the Bible. What we get instead is Fulnecky’s personal truth.