Or she could become a pharmacist who refuses to dispense medications which offend her religious sensibilities.
Her career is a right-wing grifter and she’s excelling at it.
I vehemently disagree with this take. The teacher mentioned ideology because obviously the student was going to bring it up as the reason for their post. There clearly was a rubric, and the student didn’t pass it. And no teacher should feel obligated to give token points because they are afraid of a public storm.
This was an attack on a trans person. It does not matter one bit how she would have responded. She literally had another teacher agree with her. She was damned no matter what.
I know conservatives who read the teacher’s response and changed their mind. That wouldn’t happen with some dry thing that ignored the actual underlying problems with the fake essay.
Every student who goes there said they don’t think anything at all would have happened if the teacher wasn’t trans. The idea that her explaining the underlying problems is what created or worsened the problem is ridiculous.
Your point is well-taken, and at the same time it’s true that the teacher handed her a piece of ammo when they brought up the inappropriateness of writing a screed instead of an essay.
I think the fundamental problem is that the essay doesn’t address the science at all. Based on her work, I have no idea if she read beyond the first few sentences of the abstract. That should be enough to give her a very low score, and the professor would have been better off focusing on that.
You would think college students would know how to do this kind of work, but maybe it’s typical. I don’t know. But it reads like a high school freshmen’s persuasive writing assignment. It completely missing the mark of what’s expected for this kind of assignment.
I do think the professor could have addressed the bigotry, but outside of the grading response. Grade the essay, then sit her down and have a real talk about motivation and when it’s appropriate or not appropriate to offer one’s personal beliefs.
But this is all armchair quarterbacking. The school should have the professor’s back on this. The essay is garbage and the student is a bigot. Unfortunately, everyone’s terrified of Trump pulling funding. Hurray for fascism.
The student was very clearly trying to draw a foul by provoking the instructor. The instructor obliged by not following a grading rubric, which provided an opening for accusations of bias.
In a normal world, that opening would be comically inadequate. It would be acknowledged that although perhaps the professor has bias, as everyone does, that the their grading statement clearly and objectively explained why the essay was trash.
But in a world where conservative media has done decades of groundwork in pushing the idea that all personal perspectives are bias and all bias is a sin, it’s a slam-dunk case for ass-protecting bureaucratic university admins to punish this professor for doing an inadequate job of ass-covering (both for themselves and the university at large).
One could see my characterization as blaming the victim (the professor) here. But it’s about providing a minimal attack surface in order to deny the other side a victory. It’s not the war most of us would have chosen, but it’s the war we’re in. Nobody should make themselves an easy target. You will take fire, you will be harmed, and you will increase the likelihood of others getting attacked. Be a soldier not a hero.
Here are the instructions for the assignment
Which the professor did not reference in their grading evaluation. This was my point, thank you for your assistance in making it.
If you read the professor’s grading response, it was mainly about how offensive and unempathetic they found the essay. It gave a little treatment of the essay’s logical flaws, and essentially none to the grading rubric. If one were explicitly trying to make themselves a bright red bullseye for accusations of ideological bias, it’s hard to imagine what they’d have done differently.
We can consider an analogy, an article about the effects of racial discrimination against black students on their academic performance, say. And a response essay that basically amounted to, “I don’t think blacks are real people and so the racial discrimination is a positive thing”. And then we can posit a black professor trying to grade this racist diatribe against their own rubric.
Addressing the failure to meet the rubric is of course the best option, but I don’t think we need to give this snowflake’s bigotry any special treatment just because they pretend it’s a religious belief.
The whole cause celebre nonsense might have been avoided or at least heavily mitigated if the student had been given a ‘D’ instead of a zero. Yes, there was zero academic rigor on the part of the student in what was a psychology department class (not a theology class), and the dodo didn’t even bother to cite specific Bible references in support of their “thesis”, but more discretion in grading might’ve helped.
This affair reminded me of a freshman year college tutorial that I took, in which we were assigned to write a paper with the title "Is A Scientist Religious?, to draw out our opinions on whether religious faith was compatible with rigorous scientific work. I basically argued that no it wasn’t, not realizing at the time that our instructor, an assistant prof in the chemistry department, was a heavy-duty Christian. He gave me an A- on my paper, which was as much as my decent but not terribly original work deserved.
Agreed.
The student did apply the essay to their own experiences, and they did write clearly enough that you don’t need to re-read it to understand their meaning.
So, I think it warranted some points.
The worst feature of the student’s essay, in my opinion, was how myopic it was. If she had presented it as “here is how Christian theology views this subject, with acknowledgement that it was but one perspective among many, than I don’t think it would have received the reaction that it did.
In academia, it seems intellectually dishonest to not acknowledge the whole breadth of thinking on a subject, and if one is to take a minority view then it behooves them to acknowledge the scope of that viewpoint (I’m looking at you, vaccine skeptics).
Granted, her religion demands that one viewpoint be defended as the truth, but she comes across as hopelessly naive in her proselytizing.
For all the talk of sheltered snowflakes, it’s the Right who have been raising a generation under the premise that “this is my Faith” should shut everyone up.
No surprise that for visibility the family went to Turning Point, whose late leader was a prime practitioner of “I Make A Statement. Now YOU prove me wrong (by MY standard).”
OP here, just now realizing that I did not paste the last page of the student’s essay in my first post.
sorry!
In the interest of completeness, here is how she concludes her essay
This may be my own bias talking, since I detest points-based rubrics and numerical grades for essays, but to my mind the rubric makes this much more of a problem. I think the instructor should have abided by their stated criteria and given the student a few points for being clearly written (the student certainly makes her views clear, and the writing is fairly good on a purely mechanical level); for providing a response rather than a summary (they most certainly did that, and how!); and for having a tie-in to the assigned article. They shouldn’t get anything close to full credit in either of the last two categories, since I wouldn’t call this a thoughtful response or a clear tie-in, but in both cases, they are at least attempting to connect their ideas to the reading and they should get a point or two for it. Given the stated criteria, I think something in the 7 to 10 out of 25 range is probably the appropriate grade here. And given that the assignment asks for a personal response rather than a research-based essay, dinging the student for not relying on empirical evidence evidence or arguing against “the findings of countless articles” is problematic.
HOWEVER, the response paper also includes material that is definitely not common knowledge (the possible translations of the phrase “ezer kenegdo” and where and how it is used in the Bible) and does not appear to be cited anywhere. If the syllabus includes a clause saying that uncited material from sources is plagiarism and plagiarism is an automatic 0, that would be much easier to justify. I really, really wish the instructor had taken that approach and just not taken the bait.
If I were the department chair or director of graduate studies in this situation, I would back up the instructor in public, because this is clearly a politically motivated “gotcha,” and apparently also a personal attack since the instructor is trans, and the instructor made the kind of normal rookie mistakes that grad student instructors shouldn’t be fired over. But hoo boy would the whole department get a reminder about their obligations to stick to the stated grading criteria, and some training on how to defuse situations like this without giving the student a platform from which to play martyr.
If I were the instructor, the student would just get a D for going off on a tangent rather than really engaging with the article or demonstrating that they’ve read it closely, and for failing to recognize that the Bible translation stuff needs to be sourced (I don’t think this is purposeful plagiarism, rather sloppy citation practices), and I don’t think I would say anything about the content of the essay beyond that. But I am not trans, and have twenty-five years of teaching experience in mostly-conservative parts of the country, and like someone else said upthread, it’s easy to armchair-quarterback.
This is on topic:
I agree with all you wrote. Great post. I’ll quibble with this bit:
How about
But in a world where conservative media has done decades of groundwork in pushing the idea that all non-RW personal perspectives are bias and all non-RW bias is a sin …
They lurve them some bias and personal opinion. As long as it’s Right. Which is not the same as correct. Hell, most RW propaganda is nothing but opinion and bias disguised as reporting of objective facts.
I also don’t enjoy numerical rubric-based grades. They do work well for this sort of situation.
Another practice that works well is a standard that if a teaching assistant is planning to assign a failing grade on an assignment, the TA needs to discuss this with the instructor of record or supervisor.
And another is that in a situation like this, a re-grade by a faculty member occurs (which it did).
Yet another is that if the TA’s grading is problematic, the re-grading occurs and the TA receives additional training or remediation, or possibly has different duties assigned. The response in the current scenario probably violates the TA’s own protections as a student/employee at the university.
Good lord that’s terrible.
I don’t agree with the student’s essay in the slightest, but what the hell is this statement? It’s an opinion essay, which means the writer is expressing their own opinion. You think only opinion essays can only have (what is in your opinion) “reasonable” opinions?
Let’s not lose the plot here. If a student’s genuine opinion is that trans people should be lined up against the wall and executed by firing squad, do you think 1) that’s a reasonable opinion, and 2) that’s appropriate to submit as part of a sociology class assignment?
Students need to be respectful and professional, just like everyone. They need to be able to work in collaborative, diverse environments. They need to be able to communicate with others in their fields without being assholes.
We can quibble about whether or not “I think trans kids SHOULD be bullied” is a reasonable opinion or not, I guess, but come on. That’s toxic BS that wouldn’t fly outside of RW circles, and she has to learn that.