On today’s show, Alex and Calvin cover a recent culture war controversy tailor-made for re:verb - the sanctioning of a University of Oklahoma Psychology instructor for giving a student a poor grade on their writing assignment. At issue in the controversy, however, is not just whether the student fully completed the assignment given its specifications and rubric, but rather her invocation of alleged “Christian” beliefs about the nature of sex and gender, as well as the elevation of the issue in right-wing media and politics by the conservative organization Turning Point USA. Is this an example of ideological and religious suppression at the hands of “Big Academia”? Or is it perhaps a more sinister media ploy on the part of the organization that elevated this issue to national prominence, to further demonize transgender and nonbinary people in American society?
Calvin and Alex break down the timeline of how this controversy played out, analyzing the assignment itself, portions of the student essay (all made public by TPUSA), and the response of University of Oklahoma administrators to the allegations of bias against the student. We contextualize these artifacts with our knowledge and experience in writing classrooms, asking if better assignment design could have pre-empted this issue entirely, or if the entire event would have been weaponized against a transgender instructor regardless. We also show how this controversy is part of a broader phenomenon, bringing in research from scholars who view organizations like TPUSA through the lens of surveillance culture: turning students into “watchdogs” in classrooms with alleged “liberal bias,” publicizing the names and faces of university faculty across national media, and providing red meat for a base of extreme supporters who make threats against colleges and their faculty. We conclude with some ways forward for faculty and others who face threats from these organizations, as well as the implications of this kind of surveillance culture for writing pedagogy more broadly.
Key Reference MaterialAssignment Guidelines & Rubric:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vgjTfejwWz7Sw7voi57kwaVQAql3doSe/view
Article referenced in assignment guidelines:
Jennifer A. Jewell & Christia Spears Brown - “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence” in Social Development
Samantha Fulnecky’s full essay:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qxnVi_yaJ-Fb9u1-A1Vy2vQT3Aiw8Nix/view
Instructor’s Comments on the Essay:
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/education/2025/11/25/ou-oklahoma-samantha-fulnecky-read-essay-gender-bible/87463858007/
University of Oklahoma Official Statement on the Issue:
https://x.com/UofOklahoma/status/1995186884704690262
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
AAUP Guidelines on Targeted Harassment of Faculty: https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/political-attacks-higher-ed/targeted-harassment-faculty
Faculty First Responders Info on TPUSA: https://facultyfirstresponders.com/tpusa/
McCarthy, S. & Kamola, I. (2022). Sensationalized surveillance: Campus reform and the targeted harassment of faculty. New Political Science, 44(2): pp. 227-247. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2021.1996837
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)
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On today’s show, Alex and Calvin cover a recent culture war controversy tailor-made for re:verb - the sanctioning of a University of Oklahoma Psychology instructor for giving a student a poor grade on their writing assignment. At issue in the controversy, however, is not just whether the student fully completed the assignment given its specifications and rubric, but rather her invocation of alleged “Christian” beliefs about the nature of sex and gender, as well as the elevation of the issue in right-wing media and politics by the conservative organization Turning Point USA. Is this an example of ideological and religious suppression at the hands of “Big Academia”? Or is it perhaps a more sinister media ploy on the part of the organization that elevated this issue to national prominence, to further demonize transgender and nonbinary people in American society?
Calvin and Alex break down the timeline of how this controversy played out, analyzing the assignment itself, portions of the student essay (all made public by TPUSA), and the response of University of Oklahoma administrators to the allegations of bias against the student. We contextualize these artifacts with our knowledge and experience in writing classrooms, asking if better assignment design could have pre-empted this issue entirely, or if the entire event would have been weaponized against a transgender instructor regardless. We also show how this controversy is part of a broader phenomenon, bringing in research from scholars who view organizations like TPUSA through the lens of surveillance culture: turning students into “watchdogs” in classrooms with alleged “liberal bias,” publicizing the names and faces of university faculty across national media, and providing red meat for a base of extreme supporters who make threats against colleges and their faculty. We conclude with some ways forward for faculty and others who face threats from these organizations, as well as the implications of this kind of surveillance culture for writing pedagogy more broadly.
Key Reference MaterialAssignment Guidelines & Rubric:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vgjTfejwWz7Sw7voi57kwaVQAql3doSe/view
Article referenced in assignment guidelines:
Jennifer A. Jewell & Christia Spears Brown - “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence” in Social Development
Samantha Fulnecky’s full essay:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qxnVi_yaJ-Fb9u1-A1Vy2vQT3Aiw8Nix/view
Instructor’s Comments on the Essay:
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/education/2025/11/25/ou-oklahoma-samantha-fulnecky-read-essay-gender-bible/87463858007/
University of Oklahoma Official Statement on the Issue:
https://x.com/UofOklahoma/status/1995186884704690262
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
AAUP Guidelines on Targeted Harassment of Faculty: https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/political-attacks-higher-ed/targeted-harassment-faculty
Faculty First Responders Info on TPUSA: https://facultyfirstresponders.com/tpusa/
McCarthy, S. & Kamola, I. (2022). Sensationalized surveillance: Campus reform and the targeted harassment of faculty. New Political Science, 44(2): pp. 227-247. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2021.1996837
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse. We outline some key strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discuss its social and political implications as a form of large-scale “mind control.”
The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.
To put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding student protests against the most recent flare-up in Israel’s war on Gaza: Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian’s email to university students and faculty in response to a recent student vigil where the phrase “from the river to the sea” was chanted. We closely analyze the careful manipulations of emphasis and value that Jahanian creates in his discourse, which subtly demonizes student demonstrators advocating for peace and the cessation of violence between Israel and Hamas, while reaffirming the supposedly apolitical “commitments” of the institution he represents.
Full Text Version of Farnam Jahanian Email
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]
Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]
van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.
An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent@gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.
re:verb
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin cover a recent culture war controversy tailor-made for re:verb - the sanctioning of a University of Oklahoma Psychology instructor for giving a student a poor grade on their writing assignment. At issue in the controversy, however, is not just whether the student fully completed the assignment given its specifications and rubric, but rather her invocation of alleged “Christian” beliefs about the nature of sex and gender, as well as the elevation of the issue in right-wing media and politics by the conservative organization Turning Point USA. Is this an example of ideological and religious suppression at the hands of “Big Academia”? Or is it perhaps a more sinister media ploy on the part of the organization that elevated this issue to national prominence, to further demonize transgender and nonbinary people in American society?
Calvin and Alex break down the timeline of how this controversy played out, analyzing the assignment itself, portions of the student essay (all made public by TPUSA), and the response of University of Oklahoma administrators to the allegations of bias against the student. We contextualize these artifacts with our knowledge and experience in writing classrooms, asking if better assignment design could have pre-empted this issue entirely, or if the entire event would have been weaponized against a transgender instructor regardless. We also show how this controversy is part of a broader phenomenon, bringing in research from scholars who view organizations like TPUSA through the lens of surveillance culture: turning students into “watchdogs” in classrooms with alleged “liberal bias,” publicizing the names and faces of university faculty across national media, and providing red meat for a base of extreme supporters who make threats against colleges and their faculty. We conclude with some ways forward for faculty and others who face threats from these organizations, as well as the implications of this kind of surveillance culture for writing pedagogy more broadly.
Key Reference MaterialAssignment Guidelines & Rubric:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vgjTfejwWz7Sw7voi57kwaVQAql3doSe/view
Article referenced in assignment guidelines:
Jennifer A. Jewell & Christia Spears Brown - “Relations Among Gender Typicality, Peer Relations, and Mental Health During Early Adolescence” in Social Development
Samantha Fulnecky’s full essay:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qxnVi_yaJ-Fb9u1-A1Vy2vQT3Aiw8Nix/view
Instructor’s Comments on the Essay:
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/education/2025/11/25/ou-oklahoma-samantha-fulnecky-read-essay-gender-bible/87463858007/
University of Oklahoma Official Statement on the Issue:
https://x.com/UofOklahoma/status/1995186884704690262
Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode
AAUP Guidelines on Targeted Harassment of Faculty: https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/political-attacks-higher-ed/targeted-harassment-faculty
Faculty First Responders Info on TPUSA: https://facultyfirstresponders.com/tpusa/
McCarthy, S. & Kamola, I. (2022). Sensationalized surveillance: Campus reform and the targeted harassment of faculty. New Political Science, 44(2): pp. 227-247. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2021.1996837
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)
