The immeasurable harm of weaponizing student beliefs

A transgender instructor at the University of Oklahoma (OU) has been placed on leave after giving a failing grade to an essay that, among other things, claimed that acknowledging the existence of more than two genders is "demonic" (the existence is biological, but that's for another post). The entire drama looks like an obvious setup: a high-profile conservative organization got ahold of the essay, rubric, and instructor comments and amplified them on its platforms, following the current scapegoater's playbook of using a transgender person to gin up audience outrage and attention. Predictably In These Times, the university caved to blowback.

The student filed a complaint with the university administration, claiming that the grading violated her free speech rights. She is now making the pundit rounds, and the usual players in this ongoing national farce are grandstanding about "indoctrination" at universities and thumping on about a bias against Christianity. Nevermind that this student clearly has beliefs that she continues to hold, despite her exposure to academic analysis that could have challenged those beliefs. Nevermind that pretty much every campus in this country has at least one Christian student organization, and that many schools themselves are explicitly affiliated with a Christian denomination. Nevermind that this student's seemingly sincerely held beliefs are being weaponized to attack the very school she chose to attend.

And nevermind that almost every single student at a college or university is an adult. Their belief systems were established in the years before they arrived, with some of those beliefs burrowing taproots so deep that nothing will replace them. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not spent much time around adolescents, in high school or at the college/university level. Post-secondary students are not impressionable preschoolers with just a few years of life under their belts. They've been around for almost two decades by the time they set foot on a college campus. Almost all of them have spent much of that time being sentient and educated and exposed through parents, peers, and preferred social media platforms to an assortment of ideas and beliefs. They are not naïve, empty vessels vulnerable to being flooded with commie propaganda streaming from an ivory tower.

It has always been and continues to be absurd to claim that students arrive in university classrooms with malleable belief structures that are highly vulnerable to "demonic" manipulation by godless, earth-tone–clad eggheads. The reality is that instructors are lucky if students are attending class and listening at all. The reality is that students rarely have done the reading because they are oversubscribed elsewhere or got ChatGPT to summarize it for them. The reality is that students are far more tuned in to the discourse among themselves and on social media than to classroom engagement. Drawing their attention to classroom material and away from their natural social interests in each other and TikTok is one of the biggest instructional challenges on campus. Or it used to be, before simply introducing or discussing expansive ideas about the human condition became subject to targeted attacks led by shameless thought-police commandants on social media.

The student who wrote this essay obviously is not vulnerable to new indoctrination on her campus. Students who arrive at school and immediately seek a like-minded ideological in-group aren't either. They're indoctrinated already, and they try to connect with others who think like they do, which inevitably deepens their doctrinal commitment. The availability of ideological in-groups that reinforce existing thinking is the campus indoctrination risk, not the potential to discover new ideas in the classroom. Part of the institutional mission of these schools should explicitly be to challenge students to examine ideological systems, including their own, from a critical and analytical perspective.

After 30 years in education at public and private institutions, I can say that I've only encountered institutional indoctrination efforts in one educational setting: a white Christian evangelical school. Given the setting, the indoctrination was expected and even desired by the parents who paid to send their children to the school. This was a place where demons and witches were seen as real threats, where faculty openly talked about enacting biblically inspired vengeance on students who "misbehaved," where students showed some of the most overt racism I've ever witnessed in a classroom, and where faculty members engaged in extramarital affairs with a remarkable zeal. I once said, "For God's sake" or something like that in class, and a student immediately challenged me for using the Lord's name in vain and informed me forcefully that she wouldn't tolerate that in her presence. I responded that I admired her commitment to defending her convictions, which was true. Having grown up amid Christian evangelicals, I didn't find her reaction especially surprising.

As part of my decades in education, I spent several years at a private university teaching science to non-science majors. The class also was a writing credit, so the students had to write essays. The emphasis for these essays was to make a claim, support it with evidence, anticipate counter arguments, and marshal evidence in response to them. These papers were exercises in critical thinking, and the foundational aim was for students to understand how to structure an evidence-based defense of their claims. My rule for grading these essays was that what they claimed and my own regard for the claim were irrelevant – students were graded on whether they provided three sourced examples of evidence, anticipated two counter arguments, and provided examples of evidence against them. I wanted them to embrace the critical-thinking aspect without worrying about my personal reaction to their claim.

The student essays covered a wide range of claims, such as one student's assertion that the "singularity was coming, very soon" (spoiler: It did not). But the most memorable entry for me was from a follower of a religion predicated on the idea that aliens came to earth and created humans. This student's first draft did not meet the criteria for evidence or counter-argument, which I noted in asking the student to revise. The student did the revision, provided the requested evidence with sources, and checked the boxes for anticipating counter arguments and responding to them. I assigned the student a good score because the student completed the assignment according to the instructions. The beliefs endorsed in the essay were not relevant. The structure and content of the essay were.

The OU student at the center of the current controversy believes that she should have earned a 100% for the essay she submitted. I've read it, and I've applied the rubric provided for the assignment. In this process, I followed the same approach I used for grading some very similar essays some of my Christian evangelical students had to write for my class. I think I've established that I am fully capable of doing this kind of grading fairly, regardless of the consonance of my belief systems with those of my students. For this particular essay, I would have no-graded the submission and asked for a rewrite because nothing about it meets the requirements for the assignment. It does not meet the lowest threshold in structure or content.

Meanwhile, the grad student instructor at a public university, a person who lives on a pittance and grades these essays at volume yet manages to do so with detailed, thoughtful, defensible, valid feedback, is on leave for doing the job they were hired to do.

Bad writing and bad faith got us to these moments that end up turning the wrath of the mob on hardworking, anonymous people just trying to do their jobs in trying to educate others. They are educators generally adhering to the belief system that should matter most in an educational institution: a deep commitment to the power of learning, intellectual rigor, and leading with curiosity.

The weaponization of student beliefs to attack our colleges and universities for personal and political gain undermines the potential of every human brain on these campuses. It also does a disservice to the students whose beliefs are weaponized, rigidly confining them forever as public defenders of their current faith and shutting the door on that most precious of human experiences: learning something new. Institutions of higher education should not be caving to this weaponization and instead should be highlighting and defending against its harms.