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)
E89: Distance and Suffering in News Reporting (w/ John Oddo, Cameron Mozafari, & Alex Kirsch)
re:verb
1 hour 7 minutes 11 seconds
1 year ago
E89: Distance and Suffering in News Reporting (w/ John Oddo, Cameron Mozafari, & Alex Kirsch)
On today’s show, Calvin and Alex sit down with the co-authors of a hot-off-the-presses article in Discourse & Society about journalistic reporting on US drone strikes in the Middle East: Dr. John Oddo (Carnegie Mellon University), Dr. Cameron Mozafari (Cornell University), and Alex Kirsch (MA Professional Writing graduate, CMU). In their article, entitled “Sustaining or overcoming distance in representations of US drone strikes,” they examine deictic language - words and phrases that “point” to contextual elements construed as “close” or “far away.” Specifically, they analyze how this type of language is used to make US audiences feel sympathetic or apathetic toward the US drone war and the suffering it caused to ordinary civilians in the 2000s and 2010s.
In our conversation, we talk with the authors about how deictic language can position a reader audience as “near” or far” from descriptions of suffering in terms of space, time, veracity, sense perception, emotion, and perspective. They take us through the major findings in their article’s comparison between how the Associated Press and The American Prospect used this language - to different extremes - in order to render people suffering from US military violence as immediate, worthy of attention and sympathy, or distant, opaque, and foreign. We also discuss the implications for how this language is used in reporting on other policy issues both foreign and domestic, and the affordances of this model for helping us understand how language in news reporting creates mental images.
John, Cameron, and Alex’s co-authored article:
Oddo, J., Mozafari, C., & Kirsch, A. (2024). Sustaining or overcoming distance in representations of US drone strikes. Discourse & Society.
Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode:
Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Random House.
Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge University Press.
Cap, P. (2008). Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(1), 17-41.
Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge.
————. (2014). Language, space and mind: The conceptual geometry of linguistic meaning. Cambridge University Press.
Chouliaraki, L. (2013). The ironic spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism. John Wiley & Sons.
Kopytowska, M. (2015a). Covering conflict: Between universality and cultural specificity in news discourse, genre and journalistic style. International Review of Pragmatics, 7(2), 308-339.
————. (2015b) Ideology of ‘here’ and ‘now’: Mediating distance in television news. Critical Discourse Studies 12(3): 347-365.
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)
