News and Notes: Religion Trumps Empirical Reasoning
By George Francis Kane
In November, a class at the University of Oklahoma at Norman became the national focus of a conflict between a student’s claim of religious liberty and the separation of State and Church. The Psychology Department class in “Lifespan Development” was taught by a transgender female teaching assistant, Mel Curth. The assignment at issue was for the students to review a 2013 study titled “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence.”
A student in the class, Samantha Fulnecky, rejected the study’s thesis that feeling “gender typical,” conforming to societal ideas of one’s gender, boosts peer popularity; while feeling “gender atypical,” that is, not conforming to societal norms, leads to rejection, teasing, and mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety in early adolescence. In her paper, Fulnecky asserted that God created only two genders, male and female. She wrote that she does not consider it to be a problem when peers use teasing to enforce gender norms. She wrote that “(i)t is perfectly normal for kids to follow gender ‘stereotypes’ because that is how God made us.”
Curth failed the paper, noting that Fulnecky had not fulfilled the requirements of the assignment. In response, Fulnecky accused Curth of anti-Christian bias and protested her grade. She was enthusiastically supported by numerous Christian Nationalist activists, including Turning Point, the campus organization created by the late Charlie Kirk.
University of Oklahoma President Joseph Harroz opened an appeal of Fulnecky’s grade on the assignment, a routine procedure, but hinted at prejudging the case in Ms. Fulnecky’s favor by putting TA Curth on administrative leave, and replacing him for the duration of the course by a full professor. He has already stated that Fulnecky’s course grade should not suffer because of this assignment. It seems highly likely that at a time when the federal government is inflicting severe penalties on colleges for allegedly “anti- Christian” policies, Harroz is signalling that the university is ready to rule that Ms. Fulnecky’s freedom of religion has been violated.
As a government agency, a state university is bound by the religion clauses of the first amendment. It must not restrict Ms. Fulnecky’s exercise of religion by penalizing her for her beliefs. But in accordance with the Establishment Clause, it must also not endorse the dogmas of any religion. A psychology class should explore human behavior within the framework of the scientific method, and eschew conclusions based on faith.
The assignment required students to demonstrate that they had read and understood the article and provided a critical response grounded in empirical reasoning. These are the basic expectations of any university-level psychology course. The class instructions stated that the paper should demonstrate a clear “tie-in” to the study and discuss either the topic’s importance, its application to one’s own experiences, possible alternate interpretations of the study’s data, or its relation to other studies and findings in developmental psychology. On these criteria, Curth graded the paper zero of a possible 25 points. The course’s supervising professor, Megan Waldron, independently confirmed that the paper did not meet minimum standards of academic writing. Fulnecky’s arguments against the study were based entirely upon religious dogma and documented that her conclusions from faith were unquestioned. The injection of religion into the argument was done by Fulnecky alone, while the course curriculum, assignments and grading standards were religiously neutral.
Curth’s notes advised Fulnecky to share her personal disagreements with the study’s findings “in a way that is appropriate and using the methodology of empirical psychology, as aligned with the learning goals in this class.” The TA also offered to discuss any of Fulnecky’s concerns or questions and to provide additional educational resources.
The American university is conceived as a marketplace of contesting ideas from which greater truths may be discovered through rigorous application of empirical research and critical thinking. The Fulnecky case shows instead that religion is being privileged with shielding from examination. Surely future students will now justify their own extreme prejudices by claiming they are victims of anti-Christian bias.
