How sweet the sound. A pre-med student from University of Oklahoma sang the hymn of discontent when she was graded zero for an essay she wrote for a psychology class, suggesting that her womanliness was, in fact, a miracle, certified by the divine

Samantha Fulnecky in her patriotic best. Illustration: Just So. Main photo: samantha_fulnecky/Instagram

It was a big fat zero. Nil. Didn’t make the cut. Not one bit. A medical student (or one “on track” to read medicine) failed in an essay for a psychology class. She was graded “0”, as The Oklahoman first reported three weeks ago. Samantha Fulnecky was handed an assignment at University of Oklahoma, a place where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, and apparently, so does scientific method, and straight out the window. It required her to respond to a scholarly article on gender norms and adolescent mental health. She did the genius thing by turning what should have been an academic paper into a bible study prep talk, arguing that “God only created men and women”. That’s odd. According to Genesis, the first two were man and rib. But Ms Fulnecky knew better. She “grew up in church” and, even in campus, she never left the nave, and brilliantly turned personal belief against scholarship. The former won, of course, because convictions don’t require citations.

A zero grade should have sent the person to the pedestal of shame. But Ms Fulnecky hilariously characterised the fail as religious discrimination, and took it to the very people who would be eager to amplify her claim: her mother (an attention magnet herself), politicians, conservative groups (not least Turning Point USA), and the news media. It quickly turned her little essay (630 words instead of the necessary minimum of 650) into a flashpoint about free speech and faith on campus. What was, to so many watching, an open-and-shut case of disciplinary non-compliance, she strategically leveraged the institutional rejection of her lovely thesis—“Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desire in our hearts”—to suddenly discovering the fabulous, media-ready benefits of being religiously oppressed.

During an interview with News 9 Oklahoma City. Screen shot: news9oklahomacity/YouTube

Naturally, the University of Oklahoma, fearful of a media vortex powerful enough to pull the funds out of the deepest donor pockets, did the only logical thing: they favoured the student by kindly removing the record that led to her academic trauma. The instructor, one Mel Curth, who graded Ms Fulnecky’s assignment and dared expect a science paper in a science class, was ushered into the ignominious hush of “administrative leave”. It seems that at OU, the customer-as-student is always right, in particular when she comes armed with a King James Bible (or, maybe, the New International Version?) and a Fox News producer pinned on her DMs. In the end, with her grade nullified, it proved that in the Oklahoman academy, a sufficiently loud prayer can indeed move mountains, or at least, shift a GPA from failure to fragile with a single, indifferent scribble of e-ink.

In view of the speed of the grievance climbing to glory, it is not hard to see that Ms Fulnecky thrived on the attention than the scholarship. She has appeared in at least two media interviews since the news broke at the end of last month, including with Fox News, on which she insisted that she did no wrong. “I was told to give my opinion and so I did.” Her detractors have pointed out that she used no empirical data in her this-is-what-I-think essay. She told News 9 Oklahoma City that the instructions did not state that particular requirement. One of the reasons that was given to her for the zero grade was that “I did not use empirical evidence.” Her next move? “So I sent screenshots of the instructions and syllabus to the instructor and it doesn’t say anywhere that I need empirical evidence in this assignment.” She is the girl who buys a hair dryer, finds it won’t work, and when told why, says, “but nowhere does it say that I need to plug it in”.

On Fox News, looking professional. Screen shot: foxnews/YouTube

Curious to see how she manifests the desirable “womanly desire” she so passionately claimed God instilled in women’s hearts, we consulted her Instagram page. It is filled with images of her in what looks be a freshman year. The grid is populated with her showing off clothes that immediately reveals a persona that is strikingly juvenile, a surprising contrast for a college junior. But it does say, as she stated in her essay, “I am happy to be following a stereotype that aligns with the gifts and abilities God gave me as a woman.” And that stereotype is ‘Standard Issue Southern Student’—no deviation, no surprises; her sneakers say she has never heard of Kith and her shorts, strictly theoretical. She loves colour, but so do red-eyed tree frogs. When she ‘dresses up’, the “womanly desire” is expressed through double-bra tops that represent a sect of modesty so niche, it only applies when there’s a ring-light present to serve as halo. Her style says sexy sanctimony, but her reaction to her zero grade has been supreme sacrilege. And then on TV, the costume change: she is suddenly Karoline Leavitt, complete with a cross pendant.

Then there is the matter of the Gen-Z fallacy: the curious modern delusion that performance is a perfect substitute for presence. In this hall of mirrors, being ‘authentic’ is a perfect-score virtue that supersedes being accurate. Ms Fulnecky didn’t fail a psychology assignment; she experienced an affront to her religious beliefs. To her, and to a generation raised on the sovereign sanctity of the ‘self,’ a lecturer’s rubric is no longer a professional standard, but a micro-aggression against her personal brand of I-say-what-want. In the Gen-Z ecosystem, if you film your struggle and narrate your urgent ‘truth’ with enough conviction, the actual work—the citations, the data, the pesky 20 extra words—is just background noise. She fell headfirst into the trap of believing that because she felt like a scientist, the university was obligated to certify her as one.

Ms Fulnecky seems to like the drouble-bra top for meeting friends. Photos: samantha_fulnecky/Instagram

Frankly, why does Ms Fulnecky bother with the drudgery of medical school prerequisites at all? Why spend a decade in the sterile, evidence-based purgatory of residency when the digital Promised Land is calling? Why choose gender-neutral scrubs when she could be in feminine, skin-hinting garb? A pre-med degree is a heavy lift, but a microphone and a ring-light are remarkably light. With her talent for turning an academic fail into a national firestorm, she is overqualified for the laboratory and perfectly suited for the podcast circuit. She needn’t worry about the scientific method when she can master the method of the “Viral Martyr”. Why heal the sick when you can simply monetise the offended? We can already hear the intro music to her future YouTube show—The Beautiful Truth?—where the dryer is never plugged in, but the hot air is constant.

We keep reminding ourselves: In America today, outrage is more important than expertise, decibels than depth. Ms Fulnecky showed that with volume over rigour, grievance gets traction, regardless of whether it’s grounded in evidence. Or, even when her essay could easily pass off as a cover letter to accompany her CV for a job application as Erika Kirk’s personal assistant. What she wrote, including calling her fellow classmates “cowardly and insincere” and that “every single person who believes that there are more than two genders is deceived. They are deceived by a demonic way of thinking that is only aimed at destroying lives”, was aimed at the grievance economy, where Mrs Kirk and others reward ideological fidelity over scholarly heft. She was appealing to the outrage circuit. She did not submit an essay to a mean TA (teaching assistant); she sent in an audition tape to the culture war. The ensuing public vent was abundantly clear: Samantha Fulnecky prefers the immediate glory of a Fox News spill-all than the hard work of a grade that is not a gaping zero.