Believers Community News

OKLAHOMA INSTRUCTOR REMOVED FROM TEACHING FOR FAILING A BIBLE-BASED GENDER ESSAY

At the end of 2025, the University of Oklahoma fired an instructor who was accused by a student of religious discrimination over a failing grade on a psychology paper. Samantha Fulnecky, a junior at the school, received zero out of 25 on an assignment in which she referenced the Bible after graduate teaching assistant William “Mel” Curth scored the paper. 

Curth tasked Fulnecky and her classmates with writing a response to a scholarly article titled “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence,” which discusses results of a study about gender norms among middle schoolers and the social ramifications children may face for not conforming to gender norms. 

The third-year student responded by saying that gender norms should be celebrated, not denigrated. She cited Genesis, the first book of the Bible, in which God created men and women equally, but with separate purposes. 

Fulnecky appealed her grade on the assignment, which was worth 3% of the final grade in the class, and the university said the assignment would not count. 

Fulnecky wrote that she was frustrated by the premise of the assignment because she does not believe that there are more than two genders based on her understanding of the Bible, according to a copy of her essay provided to The Oklahoman. 

In feedback obtained by the newspaper, Curth said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment,” contradicted itself, relied on “personal ideology” over evidence and “is at times offensive.” “Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” Curth wrote. 

The university posted a statement on X that its investigation found the graduate teaching assistant had been “arbitrary” in giving 20-year-old junior Samantha Fulnecky zero points on the assignment.  

“The University of Oklahoma believes strongly in both its faculty’s rights to teach with academic freedom and integrity and its students’ right to receive an education that is free from a lecturer’s impermissible evaluative standards,” the university’s statement said. “We are committed to teaching students how to think, not what to think.”

cnn.com/2025/12/24/us/oklahoma-university-bible-essay-hnk