BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE

In a society free from superstition and bigotry, a society in which anti-intellectual reactionaries held no sway, Samantha Fulknecky’s complaint would have gotten no traction. Fulnecky, as most followers of higher education news are aware, is the University of Oklahoma undergraduate who submitted a religious screed to fulfill a reaction paper assignment in a developmental psychology course. She was unhappy to earn zero points for her efforts.

The instructor, Mel Curth, a graduate student in psychology, justified the grade on the grounds that Fulnecky’s paper didn’t meet the requirements of the assignment, which called for a thoughtful discussion of a scholarly article. Fulnecky went public with a complaint about the grade and got right-wing politicians to pressure university administrators to intervene on her behalf. Predictably, administrators folded—due process be damned—and relieved Curth of her teaching duties, thus throwing Curth, academic freedom, and the integrity of the university under the neofascist juggernaut.

I’ve seen the assignment and read Fulnecky’s paper, and, contrary to what University of Oklahoma administrators have claimed, the zero grade was not “arbitrary.” As Curth explained, Fulnecky’s reaction paper did not seriously engage with or discuss the original article in a way that would merit credit in a psychology course taught in a modern university. Curth might have been hardnosed in giving the paper a zero, but the grade, it seems to me, was within reasonable bounds of an instructor’s judgment, given the assignment and the context.

My sympathies are with Curth and the standards of academic rigor she was trying to uphold. Yet I can also see how the assignment invited dispute. For decades, I used a similar kind of assignment in all my sociology courses, most of which dealt with no less contentious matters—social class, race, gender—that could have caused students to blow up. But that didn’t happen, even with students whose prior beliefs were shaken. I attribute this in part to how my assignment differed from Curth’s.

For instance, Curth’s assignment asks students to react to a reading, whereas I asked students to reflect on each reading. I avoided the term “reaction” precisely because it opens the door to unproductive rants. After all, students can claim that whatever they say about a reading is a reaction, no matter how off-the-wall or devoid of substance. Curth’s assignment gave Fulnecky grounds to press this kind of argument about her grade.

And whereas Curth’s assignment disallows summarizing, I always asked students to begin by summarizing a reading. I wanted students to show, before they began reflecting, that they understood what they were reflecting on. Early on, I learned that some students react strongly to what they mistakenly think an author is saying. Requiring a summary cut down on this problem.

My assignment was low stakes—each paper was worth one point, indicated by a check mark. If the summary hit the main points of a reading and the reflection was okay, I gave the check mark. Occasionally, I gave a check-minus if a paper was badly done. Plagiarism was the only cause for a zero. Early in the semester, when students were first learning how to do these papers, I might give an R—meaning: This is way off the mark; rewrite it and you can still get full credit. After the first few weeks, nearly every paper earned a check mark.

It helped that I let students say, after they wrote a summary, how they felt about a reading. I didn’t encourage this, because, as I also told them, what mattered wasn’t whether they liked or disliked a reading but whether they understood it and learned something from it. Yet I allowed them to express their feelings if they also reflected on those feelings. Students could thus vent if they wished, and they knew I would take them seriously and respond seriously. More than anything, I think this is what prevented blow-ups and grade disputes. The reflection papers were a safety valve with pedagogical benefits.

Other teaching tricks helped, too. In class, I modeled how to critique the argument in a reading, showing students how to go beyond “I just disagree” or “I think the author is wrong.” Sometimes I would take issue with a reading in a way that I knew would resonate with conservative students, trying to articulate their objections as well or better than they could. Then I would turn around and critique my critique. By doing this, conservative students could see that I was not unaware or dismissive of how they saw the world, even though I was offering them a different perspective. Students could also see that I didn’t necessarily agree with everything I gave them to read, and they didn’t have to, either—provided they disagreed in an intellectually responsible way.

In the current political era, even the best teaching techniques are no guarantee that trouble won’t find us, especially if we are exposing students to ideas that challenge their beliefs. Yet it’s possible to teach in ways that avoid courting surplus trouble and giving ammunition to enemies of academic freedom. If Fulnecky had been my student, I would have given her an R, an option to rewrite, along with a face-to-face explanation of how to write a proper college-level reflection paper. It’s always better, for us and our students, if we can turn potential powder kegs into teaching opportunities.

Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.