Ryan Walters had a suggestion for the University of Oklahoma student who emailed him for help over a bad grade.
“Fight back.”
The student, Samantha Fulnecky, a junior on a pre-med track, recently got a 0 on her essay that leaned on her Christian beliefs for an assignment on gender stereotypes in her psychology class. The instructor told her in a Nov. 16 message that her essay was offensive and lacked evidence. Fulnecky said she felt like she’d been penalized for her religious views.
Walters, the CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance, a political nonprofit that opposes teachers unions, gained a national reputation for taking on culture war issues related to education during his time as the state schools superintendent. He quickly got on the phone with her.
He encouraged her to sue and promised to try to get the Trump administration and state officials to investigate anti-Christian bias at the University of Oklahoma and demand funding cuts. And he believed she needed to go public.
“Taxpayers are paying into this institution,” he said in an interview. “They need to know exactly what’s going on. We need to be bringing more of these issues to the surface and not allowing college education bureaucracy to sweep this nonsense under the rug.”
Fulnecky appeared to follow his advice. She spoke with a local reporter at The Oklahoman, which published the first story about Fulnecky’s grade on Nov. 25. She then asked Kalib Magana, the president of the university’s Turning Point USA chapter, if he would use the group’s social media accounts to publicize what happened to her assignment. He did, and the group’s X post, which said that one of the instructors who graded Fulnecky’s essay is transgender, racked up more than 47 million views.
Fulnecky’s fight quickly went from a local controversy to a national one. Republican lawmakers in deep-red Oklahoma called on the university president to resign and threatened to cut the school’s funding. Fulnecky appeared multiple times on Fox News, spoke onstage at a local Turning Point USA event and received an award at another political group’s event.
Two instructors have now been placed on leave, and one has been removed from teaching a course. On OU’s campus, protests and counterprotests have erupted. The governor called on the university’s governing board to get involved, and several state GOP lawmakers have drawn attention to the instructor’s identity and demanded meetings with university leadership.
What started as a dispute over a small assignment in a psychology course has since become the latest example of Republican politicians and media elevating culture war clashes on college campuses and turning them into national referendums on gender, religion and academic freedom.
In September, Texas A&M fired a professor over a lesson related to gender identity. Just as in Oklahoma, conservative politicians and media rallied, sharing video of the incident and declaring it an example of left-wing “indoctrination.” Just over a week later, Texas A&M’s president resigned. Later that month, the Texas Tech University system declared in a memo that faculty could “recognize only two human sexes” in classroom instruction.
The response to Fulnecky’s experience has surprised even Magana.
“I already knew that Turning Point USA was a pretty big platform, and I knew that it would gain some traction,” he said, “but I underestimated the amount of traction it was going to get. But I did know that action was going to be taken because of our efforts.”
Fulnecky, who grew up near Springfield, Missouri, did not respond to requests for an interview. She has said that she decided to take her experience public to fight for her free speech rights.
“My main goal is to encourage other Christians to stand up for their beliefs,” Fulnecky told KOKH, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma City.
On OU’s campus, some students are worried — and intimidated.
Summer Edwards, the chair of the graduate student senate and a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering, said many of her peers on campus fear for their job security and safety if they speak out, due to what Turning Point USA could do with its national reach.
“Especially going into finals season,” Edwards said, “it’s scary to be someone, even myself, who has to grade knowing that the university could allow this to happen to anybody.”
A quiet start
Fulnecky’s grading dispute initially unfolded quietly.
A week before Thanksgiving break, she was on the phone with her mother, Kristi Fulnecky, a former Missouri politician and attorney who has taken up right-wing causes. The younger Fulnecky, a straight-A student who aims to become a pediatrician, told her mom that she was stunned by her grade on a recent psychology homework assignment, and insisted she had followed the instructions, Kristi said last week on a Missouri talk radio show.
The assignment called for students to write a clear and thoughtful 650 word response to a scholarly article about gender expectations in society. According to screenshots shared by Turning Point USA’s local chapter, Fulnecky wrote in her essay that the article irritated her, and described how God created men and women differently. “Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,” she wrote.
Mel Curth, a graduate teaching assistant, wrote as part of the grading process that she had deducted points because Fulnecky submitted a “paper that does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive,” according to the screenshots of her messages.
Megan Waldron, a second graduate student who teaches the course alongside Curth, agreed with the grade. “Everyone has different ways in which they see the world, but in an academic course such as this you are being asked to support your ideas with empirical evidence and higher-level reasoning,” she wrote to Fulnecky, according to the screenshots.
Curth declined to comment, citing advice from her lawyer. Waldron did not respond to a request for comment.
At that point, the dispute might have remained private while the university’s grade appeals process, which generally takes two to three months, played out.
Fulnecky sent emails to Walters as well as the university president, the head of the psychology department, Gov. Kevin Stitt and a local newspaper, she later said onstage at a local Turning Point USA event.
Turning Point USA, founded by activist Charlie Kirk, became well known over the past decade in part for elevating political disagreements on campus to national controversy. The group’s membership grew exponentially after Kirk’s assassination, including at the University of Oklahoma. Magana, the chapter president, said their campus membership grew from 15 to 2,000 over the past year.
But Magana said the chapter didn’t even have an account for the group on X until he made one to share Fulnecky’s story. On Nov. 27, the chapter posted screenshots of her essay and Curth’s explanation for giving her a zero on it. The posts labeled Curth’s messages with “Trans Professors comment” and Waldron’s messages with “Additional professor.”
The post would spread quickly, setting off a chain reaction that would rattle the OU campus in Norman.
‘Pop and fizz’
The essay and Fulnecky quickly entered the online political fray. Some liberals argued the reaction to Fulnecky’s essay was part of a broader effort to cast Christians as persecuted, while many others picked apart her writing. Some cracked jokes and lobbed personal attacks.
Conservatives, with few exceptions, united behind her, arguing the controversy was an example of a left-wing instructor flunking a student over their Christian beliefs. Widespread media coverage locally and nationally followed, some of it about religious expression on campus, while others focused on the instructor’s gender identity.
Curth subsequently received death threats and harassment, according to the university’s graduate student senate, which has called on the university to condemn the attacks she has faced. Curth is on leave and Waldron has been removed from the course while the university conducts a religious discrimination investigation. The university did not respond to requests for comment regarding the status of the investigation into Curth or Waldron.
Fulnecky has said because they only communicated online, she did not know Curth’s gender identity until the Turning Point USA chapter pointed it out on social media. She told The College Fix, a conservative media nonprofit focused on universities, she thinks Curth should be fired if she can’t separate her personal feelings from grading assignments.
In one of multiple interviews in which she declined to use Curth’s pronouns, Fulnecky said she “never meant to offend” Curth and that she doesn’t agree with the “really hurtful things” people are posting about Curth online.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Fulnecky was also getting connected with more political figures.
Magana introduced Fulnecky to Shane Jett, a state senator and the chair of the Freedom Caucus in Oklahoma, and Bob Linn, head of the Original Constitutional Principles Affecting Culture, or OCPAC, a prominent Christian group aligned with hard-right Republicans in the state. Jett said he immediately texted other lawmakers about the situation.
Linn invited her to speak at OCPAC’s Dec. 3 meeting, because adding Fulnecky brought “a lot of pop and fizz” to the event, he said. A number of students in Turning Point USA chapters and local media showed up to hear her speak, and the group played a video message from Walters in which he hailed Fulnecky as a “hero.” Gabe Woolley, a Republican state representative from the Tulsa area, presented her at the meeting with a Citation of Recognition for going public with her grading dispute.
“The essay, I think, was simply a tool that ended up being used to expose a greater issue,” Woolley said in an interview.
Sitting on a stool next to Fulnecky, Jett said he and other lawmakers had demanded a meeting with the university’s president about it. “If you’re taking pharmaceuticals and you’re taking hormones that diminish your rational capacity, you have no business grading classes in our universities,” Jett said to applause from the audience and nodding from Fulnecky, according to video of the event. (Hormone therapy, which is used to treat a variety of conditions, does not negatively affect cognitive ability, according to research on the treatment.)
All of this attention has been new for Fulnecky. Her mother said on the radio show that out of her six children, Fulnecky “is the one who doesn’t care about politics.” However, she was excited when Walters later connected her over text message with conservative activist Riley Gaines, whom her daughter looks up to.
“People who think that she’s doing this to become the next Riley Gaines — no, she didn’t try to blow this up. People have come to her,” Linn said in an interview.
A tense campus
Back on campus, hundreds of students, faculty and community members marched on Dec. 5 in defense of Curth, as a third instructor was placed on leave due to a complaint by Magana, Turning Point USA’s chapter president.
Magana reported to university administrators that Kelli Alvarez, an associate English professor, told students on Dec. 3 that they’d get an excused absence if they demonstrated in support of Curth. Magana said he asked if he could attend as a counterprotester, and Alvarez told him he needed to organize his own protest and show that multiple students were attending, otherwise it would be unexcused.
The university placed her on leave three hours after Magana reported her, he said.
Alvarez did not respond to a request for comment.
Magana said that the department chair came to the class that afternoon to apologize, and the university also released a statement saying any student, regardless of viewpoint, would receive an excused absence to attend the protests. The university did not respond to a request for additional comment.
In an interview, Magana emphasized that Alvarez uses she/they pronouns. “I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that,” he said. “I’m just saying that it’s just the irony of the situation that both professors both use she/they pronouns, and they’re both involved in some form of discrimination.”
As the controversy mounted, so have concerns about what the situation could mean for OU instructors going forward.
Amit Baishya, secretary of the University of Oklahoma’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said he was alarmed that the university’s statement didn’t say anything about academic freedom.
“If this, unfortunately, goes against the graduate instructor, it seems to give a signal as if we’ll bow down to political pressure, and everyone seems to have a target on their backs,” said Baishya, an associate professor in the English department. “It will have a chilling effect on how we grade, what we say in class. And the fact that anything we say could come out in the public domain and we could be attacked for, that is something that really worries me.”
Jett, the state senator leading the state’s Freedom Caucus, said lawmakers are planning hearings next year to listen to college students describe how they’ve been discriminated against for conservative views.
“We’ve been asking the president of the university to speak to your students about Charlie Kirk, affirm their right to exist without being afraid they’re going to be penalized for being Christian or Jewish and conservative, and we’ve met with crickets,” he said.
“So this is just coming to a head.”
