In November 2025, a University of Oklahoma student with a powerful, privileged family received a zero on her essay. Soon all hell broke loose and by December 22, the graduate instructor who graded that student had been fired with prejudice.
The student launched her zero grade into Fox News appearances, fancy awards from political groups, and many promotional photos highlighting her Bible. God is great and in his mighty power he clearly did not want momma’s baby to get a bad grade, or so the narrative seemed to say.
A state legislator, following God’s divine instruction, filed a bill allowing Oklahoma’s legislature to freeze 100% of funding to any university showing any signs of a certain, very specific, “ideological bias.”
Back to the student paper, for a moment, the assignment had asked for analytical engagement with a psychology study on how children rate gender-typical peers as more popular. It was a short assignment. The rubric was simple. The student would get 10 of the 25 points total just for a “connection to assigned article.”
The student’s submission, however, was decidedly lacking. It was unmistakably insufficient. To put it plainly, she had made no reference to the study at all. There was NO connection to the article, despite clearly being required. Oops. She wrote off the cuff, as if mocking the assignment with word salad, that “Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires”. Women do women things. Because God. The end.
Despite the assigned article being the required source material to work with, the student preferred citing only unspecified Bible passages. She also attacked classmates as “cowardly and insincere.” At this point you might think a student who submits a bag full of dog shit is a bad enough story. The zero grade already makes perfect sense. No, she had to then light it on fire as well, writing that transgender people getting any support is “demonic.” Grades don’t go below zero.
In her own defense, the student later admitted, according to her attorney’s filing, that she didn’t care:
She “merely looked at the topic and then rushed together a response based on her personal feelings… because she was in a hurry to go see a play that evening with her friend.”
You see the problem, now? Her essay was a reflection of the putrid, the abject hate, in her personal life. It is like she didn’t take time to put her hood on before lighting the cross.
She didn’t have time to do the actual assignment as required, in the format asked of college students. So she instead submitted her more authentic voice of personal feelings, her more readily accessible and familiar home teachings, if you will.
She rushed, no time. The hard work of an assignment was tossed aside, sheets tossed to the wind, so she could catch a play with a friend. Priorities. It was later when she received her grade that she realized a complaint of religious persecution could be used to attack.
Is there a religion for going out with friends instead of doing homework? Pretty sure many college students would attend those services.
Two instructors, two more than necessary, independently confirmed that the rushed and low quality paper “should not be considered as a completion of the assignment.” Obvious, because the student herself admitted as much. The chairman of Oklahoma’s Federation of College Republicans even weighed in to call the essay “indefensible.” That sounds more serious than it is, since even the student didn’t defend her paper. She only defended her privilege to not be graded by someone that her family had raised her to hate.
Notably, rather than go through any academic appeals process to judge the work, the student pulled the Oklahoma privilege fire alarm to assemble a hate campaign. She contacted the governor, she whistled for state legislators, she called the media and… her mother.
Her mother? Isn’t that a normal thing for a kid to do when they get a bad grade? I don’t actually know, but I know her mother is an infamously anti-constitutional lawyer who has defended January 6 insurrectionists. The student’s initial complaint emails oddly targeted “overtly political actors, such as disgraced former Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters, who is known for his virulent anti-LGBTQ positions.”
Sounds less like an appeal for a grade review, and more like an appeal for a political campaign. Indeed, her powerful radical activist mom “helped her decide who to take her concerns to.”
The notorious Turning Point USA “chapter” took on the bad grade as a cause and exposed the grader’s feedback to social media, targeting her as transgender and attacking her personally:
We should not be letting mentally ill professors around students.
Forty million views for that. At this point I feel that Turning Point gets a zero for their tweet. The grader had said the paper sucked, she didn’t call a student mentally ill. But Turning Point couldn’t form a proper argument and just puked out a tired ad hominem. By their own measure they should rename themselves Mentally Ill Point, to represent better their analytic skill, if you see what I did there.
The mother went to work on her daughter’s behalf and predictably framed the case exactly backwards. She bemoaned:
First Amendment rights to be able to speak freely and to speak about their religion, especially if you are requested to do so and being asked for your opinion and not to cite sources.
If you read that right, with fascist decoder glasses on, she’s calling for state censorship of teachers. It’s literally an attack on the First Amendment couched deceptively in language of defending it.
The assignment explicitly required connection to the article. The misrepresentation of the grading rubric is deliberate. The mother is a constitutional lawyer. She can read a basic rubric.
On December 22, the University of Oklahoma succumbed to angry mob logic and fired the instructor, Mel Curth. The university arbitrarily claimed her grading was “arbitrary”, refusing to release any investigation findings.
And of course Curth was bound by confidentiality rules throughout the investigation and could not respond publicly. She was being censored. Her speech was being attacked systemically and ruthlessly. Meanwhile the student did obnoxiously loud victory laps, a circuit of national television interviews and the university issued statements.
Curth is now appealing. Her attorney states the obvious, that the investigation “failed to consider all possible motives and issues” and that “new evidence has come to light.” The attorney argues investigators never examined whether the student “may have had an ulterior motive in pursuing such a complaint”. You know, the student copying known anti-LGBTQ political figures in her initial emails being evidence of motive.
The American Association of University Professors has gathered over 24,000 signatures demanding OU explain its actions and reaffirm academic freedom, reverse the censorship.
Meanwhile, Rep. Gabe Woolley has filed House Joint Resolution 1037, which would allow the Oklahoma legislature to freeze, suspend, or withhold up to 100% of state funding to any university in the state system. If approved, it goes to a statewide ballot.
This is unmistakable constitutional inversion: the language of rights weaponized as an instrument of suppression. It’s a reminder of what Oklahoma history has been.
The First Amendment protects citizens from government suppression of speech. In this case, government actors—state legislators, the governor, the former state superintendent—actively suppressed an instructor’s capacity to teach. A state senator aggressively attacked a person, claimed hormone therapy “diminishes rational capacity” at a public rally to incite targeted hate. The governor demanded board intervention. Legislators threatened funding and announced hearings into basic education skills being an “anti-Christian bias.” Now they’re moving to give themselves power to defund any university on a whim.
The actual government suppression of speech is occurring against the instructor—fired, publicly identified, subjected to death threats, bound to silence by confidentiality rules while her accuser had a PR circuit and was feted by cable news.
The student’s speech was never suppressed.
Her essay was read, it was graded. She had rushed it to see a play and was unconcerned about the outcome. She then received a national platform for describing her grade, on her self-admitted least-effort low performance, as persecution.
The genealogy rings a certain bell for this historian, as something particular to privilege of a certain race in Oklahoma.
In August 1920, a white mob lynched teenager Roy Belton in Tulsa. The police chief and sheriff expressed gratitude to the violent mob. The Tulsa World applauded their actions as “superior to government action” and predicted the lynching “will not be the last by any means.” That same month in Oklahoma City, a mob lynched Claude Chandler, an 18-year-old Black youth. Among the mob was one O.A. Cargill, who would become the mayor of Oklahoma City. State complicity was through endorsement.
In 1921, in Tulsa, a white mob destroyed the prosperous Greenwood District known as “Black Wall Street”, killing hundreds. The police chief deputized 500 men from the mob, gave them weapons, and instructed them to “get a gun and get a nigger.” National Guard troops arrested Black residents rather than protecting them. Some guardsmen shot at Black residents, to help amplify the lethality of white mobs. Oilmen flew company planes over the Black neighborhoods and dropped petroleum on fire to burn it all to the ground. No, seriously, St. Clair Oil Company supplied the planes with proto-napalm and Captain J.R. Blaine of the police department dropped the bombs. The KKK afterwards announced a Klavern would be built on the ruins as a monument to Oklahoma white power. State complicity through participation. Oklahoma erased and buried this history, hiding the mass graves of murdered Blacks and pretending like they never saw Black Wall Street, for over 70 years.
In 1930, a mob of over 1,000 white men and boys stormed the Grady County jail in Chickasha and lynched Henry Argo, a 19-year-old Black man—despite the presence of National Guard troops ordered to protect him. The arrestees were immediately released without bond. State complicity through impunity.
Need I go on? Oklahoma has a very particular concept of who gets to be graded and who doesn’t, based on antique notions of supremacy.
In 2025, a mob threatens an instructor and ends her career. Legislators amplify the harassment, demand hearings, threaten funding, attack her medical treatment at public rallies, then file bills to defund universities that displease them. State complicity through amplification. The mob no longer needs to deputize itself when legislators do the work publicly, when 40 million views of personal attacks deliver directed force under the principle of a pen being mightier than the sword.
Endorsement, participation, impunity and amplification. The mechanisms evolve and rotate. The structure of hate groups persists in certain families who have certain authority. This is, after all, Oklahoma.
The World predicted in 1920 that the Belton lynching “will not be the last by any means.” A century later, the prediction holds—though the method has changed.
A student who rushed an assignment to see a play is cast as a martyr for religious liberty. An instructor who applied a simple and fair rubric was fired, threatened, and silenced. The vocabulary of constitutional rights has been captured by those who, in 1921, would have been accepting deputization and weapons from the police chief for America First lynchings.
This is mob rule wearing the costume of rights, in order to take them away. Oklahoma knows exactly what it is doing, again.
