The University of Oklahoma graduate assistant who was accused by a student of religious discrimination has told her side of the story for the first time and claims she was the victim of a political campaign.
Mel Curth, the OU teacher who gave junior Samantha Fulnecky a zero on an assignment because she did not do the assigned work, has filed an appeal of university administrators’ dropping the bad grade and removing the teacher from the classroom.
Fulnecky, whose mother is a far-right political activist in the state, drew national headlines with her claim of religious discrimination because she quoted the Bible in a class paper in which she said students who are different than others should be made fun of in order to make them conform to social norms.
Mel Curth
Numerous outside observers from academic posts have said Fulnecky’s paper deserved a failing grade because she did not fulfill the assigned work. Nevertheless, faced with political pressure in the state, Michael Markham, dean of OU’s Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, and Provost André-Denis Wright removed Curth from teaching and allowed Fulnecky to drop the bad grade from her class record.
Curth filed an appeal Dec. 30 with the university’s finding that “she engaged in arbitrary and capricious grading of a student’s assignment in violation of that student’s religious liberty,” her attorney said. “Ms. Curth fully denies that she engaged in any discriminatory behavior. It is her position that the investigation was flawed, failed to consider all possible motives and issues, and that new evidence has come to light that undermines the investigation’s conclusion.”
Specifically, Brittany M. Stewart said Fulnecky’s original complaint to OU administrators was copied to “overtly political actors, such as disgraced former Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters, who is known for his virulent anti-LGBTQ positions. Despite this fact, investigators failed to examine whether the student may have had an ulterior motive in pursuing such a complaint.”
Also, the lawyer said, OU leaders “continued to issue public statements regarding the investigation, despite confidentiality rules that kept Ms. Curth from being able to discuss any details of the situation, while the student was going on a circuit of local and national television interviews.”
And it was during one of those interviews, Stewart said, “the student admitted that she merely looked at the topic of the assignment and then rushed together a response based on her personal feelings regarding a tangential issue that was not even the main thesis of the assigned article, because she was in a hurry to go see a play that evening with her friend.”
The real facts, the attorney said, will show Curth did not discriminate against Fulnecky but “has been the target of a political movement that seeks to silence and/or oust LGBTQ people from academia.”
Curth is a transgender woman.
Meanwhile, OU’s Faculty Senate and its chapter of the American Association of University Professors have called for clarity over what happened in December.
According to Inside Higher Ed: “Faculty are also asking the university to strengthen its protection of instructors who are politically targeted or harassed. On Wednesday, the faculty senate voted on a vague resolution that doesn’t mention Curth by name but says that ‘several situations have left faculty and the greater OU community uncertain about the stability and clarity’ of university protections against political meddling in teaching and scholarship.”
A petition circulated by the AAUP chapter demands the administration release full details on the processes that led to Curth’s suspension, publicly affirm faculty’s right to teach and research free from political interference and help develop a “harassment response and prevention plan” for responding to political attacks.
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