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)
E98: Discourse & Manipulation, Pt. 3 - Manipulative Silences in Post-Election Post-Mortems
re:verb
1 hour 17 minutes
1 year ago
E98: Discourse & Manipulation, Pt. 3 - Manipulative Silences in Post-Election Post-Mortems
On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on Discourse and Manipulation by examining the role of manipulative silence in various post-mortems to the 2024 Presidential Election.
As a second-term President Donald Trump looms, many have been debating: what went wrong in the Democrats’ campaign? What policy positions, rhetorical strategies and slip-ups, or other contextual factors led Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be so soundly defeated? However, amidst all of the post-mortem analysis by institutional Democrats and their surrogates in the media, some salient concerns seem to be missing: namely, the various causes and effects of economic and political precarity that many communities in the US are actively experiencing, and the Democrats’ seeming unwillingness to address these issues head-on. Instead, many are using this epideictic moment to blame scores of abstract, ill-defined terms for the election loss: “wokeness,” “inflation,” “misogyny,” “political headwinds,” and “anti-incumbent sentiment,” among others.
When we apply a Critical Discourse Studies lens, we can see that all of these concepts share a common grammatical category: each one is a nominalization, or a noun that has been made out of a verb or adjective. These nominalizations serve the useful purpose of obscuring or silencing important information, such as who is responsible for an action (or who/what is being affected by it), as well as the scale of the issue.
In this episode, we examine a series of texts that use manipulative nominalizations and other discourse structures to erase the specific ways that Democratic leaders, campaign staff, and consultancy firms have acted ineffectively and destructively both in this failed run and in the recent past (e.g. Biden’s and Obama’s presidencies and Clinton’s losing bid in 2016). Instead of taking real stock of this history, these texts are mainly platforms for powerful actors to attack broad, abstract concepts, or worse, to victim-blame the voters themselves. We conclude by reflecting upon how these manipulative silences betray the Democratic establishment’s inability or unwillingness to reckon with how its own economic and material interests might be at odds with policies and platforms that could help uplift the most vulnerable in our society.
Texts Analyzed in this Episode:
Maureen Dowd - “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics”
National Organization for Women President Christian F. Nunes: “Racism, Sexism, Misogyny and Hate Won This Election, But We Won’t Let Our Democracy Be Destroyed”
David Plouffe dialogue on Pod Save America podcast episode: “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong”
Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.
Huckin, T. (2002). Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society, 13(3), 347-372.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.
Cameron Mozafari's Twitter thread summarizing his work with Michael Israel on the changing meaning of “woke”
re:verb episode 71: re:pronouns
re:verb episode 14: re:blurb - Ideographs
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)
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)
