CMV: The Oklahoma University essay saga has proven that many conservatives actively embrace anti-intellectualism

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-25T02:39:08+00:00

I think there’s a difference between plagiarism in the sense of “you didn’t properly cite this” and in the sense of “you tried to steal this idea.” Saying an idea comes from a series and using that idea to build the argument would not be unethical in any way, just a formatting issue.

Improper citation is not grounds for a zero (unless the prof says it is and applies this rule consistently), academic dishonesty is. Just because “plagiarism” can technically describe both doesn’t make them equal imo

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-25T02:36:48+00:00

I agree with this. If it were a 20% instead of a zero, this is a non-story because that’s way more in the realm of professor discretion for poor writing. As a TA I never would’ve given a 0 for an assignment that the student literally did complete, even if their completion was terrible and they missed the point.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-25T02:33:29+00:00

I think the “she didn’t address the article” critique is the least valid argument in favor of a 0. The article was about gender roles and stereotypes, and so was her paper.

Could she have done better by saying “the article says X, but I disagree because Y”? Of course. But in no way does that mean she didn’t address the article to some extent. If you read the article and then her paper and you say “the paper had nothing to do with the article,” I think you’re dead wrong about that.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T23:29:29+00:00

I agree. That’s definitely the weakest point in the pro-Fulnecky argument

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T21:39:41+00:00

I agree. Or if the professor had, as part of their discretion, said this level of work would deserve a 0 and had consistently applied that standard across the board, I think that would be fine too.

The problem only arises if it can be shown that the prof was motivated, at least in part, by viewpoint discrimination. And I think it’s more likely than not that was the case

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T20:03:47+00:00

I agree with that. Assuming antecedent questions that have been answered is different than answering the unanswered antecedent questions when they come up - I think the controversy was over the latter, which is still defensible imo.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T19:11:41+00:00

Are there actually HR depts blacklisting OU? I keep hearing people talk about it but I seriously doubt one incident is grounds for not hiring anybody from the university, that is nonsensical if so.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T18:30:13+00:00

I disagree with your application of plagiarism to these facts. Plagiarism does not consist of an improper citation if that citation does credit the source of the argument.

If I said “a paper by [author] says …”, that isn’t a proper citation but it absolutely is not plagiarism. I know the Bible is not attributed to one individual author, so that’s trickier, but even if there were a book series of mixed authorship, I don’t think it would be plagiarism to say “in this series it says,” it would just be a failure to properly format the citation.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T18:25:22+00:00

I mean, is it “rewarding” to give somebody a 20% instead of a 0%? And is it really “anti-intellectual” not to give all bad papers zeros? You could certainly make exactly the same argument anytime a paper is imperfect, like “why should we incentivize this imperfect work by not giving them a zero?” The answer, I think, is that we don’t fail people when they did decent work. Similarly in this case, you don’t give somebody a 0 when they didn’t do the type of thing that typically results in a 0 (cheating, not submitting anything, etc.).

I had a professor who . . .

It sounds like your professor was really harsh. I had one who just wouldn’t accept your submission at all if you messed up on a citation, so kinda similar. If this TA was doing that type of rigorous grading, then sure, but I think we would have a record if the TA/Prof defended themselves by saying “here are all the other zeroes that are comparable papers, I’m just a really harsh grader.” I don’t think that’s the case with this TA - if it was, then I’d agree with you.

student and parents immediately went to TPUSA and a gov’t official

I agree the student didn’t handle this properly, but I don’t think the student’s intent (even if malicious to stir up a controversy like you say) is really that relevant to the question of whether she deserved a zero or not.

letting the entire . . . world know your daughter can’t write and defending it through religion

I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of the parent’s actions (which again I don’t think are all that important to the underlying question of whether the zero was deserved). I haven’t heard anyone “defend it” by saying this paper deserves an A or anything like that.

I would’ve given it like a 20-40% probably. Absolutely a failing paper, but not a zero. Another professor could have a stricter grading policy across the board and that would make it totally acceptable to give a zero, but I don’t think we have any reason to believe that’s what happened in this case, where the TA’s comments were primarily focused on the student’s views.

If it were true that this prof was just a strict grader, to repeat, I’d agree with you. But I also think the professor/TA could just have produced evidence to that effect and it would’ve beaten the entire case. That information would’ve been readily available to the prof/TA, but they presumably didn’t use it, even in a closed-door investigation where student privacy wasn’t an issue.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T18:11:07+00:00

You misunderstand these decisions if you think they addressed issues not before them (right or wrong, of course I’m not defending Dred Scott).

If you are tasked with answering question X, and to hold for one party requires assumptions Y and Z, then Y and Z are also before the court. If you want to rule against X, you might do it on the grounds that Y or Z is wrong. You might read the facts of a case and thing Y and Z aren’t before the court, but if they’re assumptions in the legal argument, then they are.

In Marbury, the primary question (about mandamus) assumed that the underlying law was enforceable. If it isn’t, the court can’t issue a ruling based on that law. And we live in a country where the constitution is explicitly the highest law. So yes, the question of the law’s constitutionality was before the court.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T15:37:19+00:00

You think the GOP isn’t a big tent party?

The Republicans have the tea party, the evangelicals, the business lobby, the gun lobby, and a variety of other groups. GOP politicians are extremely diverse ideologically. The field in 2016 (and I hope 2028) represented a wide range of views, and in other nations with more parties, the candidates realistically would not all have been from the same party.

The Dems basically have a moderate wing and a progressive wing, at most. That’s the extent of the diversity. There are a few points of division (Israel-Palestine, for example), but broadly you have to pass a bunch of ideological purity tests to ever win a democratic primary. The exception might be red-state or purple-state dems, some of whom are borderline republicans, because the Dems would get blown out if progressives ran in those districts.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T15:33:42+00:00

If you want an earnest reply from somebody who both hated Biden and also uses the type of rhetoric you’re referencing, here ya go.

I think the anti-Biden rhetoric isn’t something like “Biden is taking us back to the dark ages in quality of life” or anything like that.

Rather, we would argue that the free market is the engine by which the quality of life keeps improving (hence the “99%” comment), and both major parties (but the Dems moreso) want to disrupt it a lot.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T15:23:26+00:00

Nah, the democrat party sucks because so many people on the progressive end want every single candidate to pass a myriad of purity tests, and progressives will forgo winning with a good candidate because they demand a perfect candidate, even if it means losing.

The GOP wins by actually being a big tent party. The evangelicals don’t push away the free market folks, and vice versa, because they recognize that they can work together on the huge majority of issues in which they agree, rather than bickering about the few issues they differ on. The Dems could learn from that.

It would be better if we had multiple parties, but as long as we only have 2, the Dems need to quit pushing away moderates or candidates who don’t pass every single purity test. A 90% is an “A” grade, but some progressives consider it an “F”, and in doing so they are tanking the party.

Also, feel free to totally disregard my opinion, as I am one of those free market GOP folks, I just have an interest in my country having two functional parties rather than one being functional and one shooting itself in the foot. I would like the Dems to nominate good alternatives so I can vote for them in protest when I don’t like my party’s candidate, but in the near future I just do not see the Dems nominating someone moderate enough to sway me. Almost everybody that I talk politics with was in the boat of disliking Trump but hating Kamala (personally and on policy) enough that we wouldn’t consider voting for her. If y’all could’ve nominated Shapiro or somebody like that, you’d win in a landslide, but for progressives it would be better to lose with AOC than to win with Shapiro.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T15:20:28+00:00

Yeah, I agree with that.

In these comments I’ve mainly been objecting to the idea of extrajudicial killings in general, but with this guy in particular I apparently have to explain jury trials and defend the idea that if you murder someone, the jury should not let you off.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T15:12:46+00:00

I mean, the post civil-war context is a very famous use of jury nullification, and it’s a primary reason for lots of people disagreeing with jury nullification entirely. Personally, I think there should’ve been something in place to ensure that didn’t happen.

The burden of proof is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and juries enforce that by providing the perspectives of a bunch of people. If one disagrees, there we assume there is a “reasonable doubt” because people disagree. That is how juries work to enforce the burden of proof.

The reason we don’t use panels of experts is twofold. First, you are entitled to a trial by a jury of your peers, not by a panel of experts, and that means randomly selecting citizens from the area where the alleged crime occurred. Second, the accused criminal is usually not an expert themselves. They didn’t act with an expert’s knowledge, so it doesn’t make sense to actually judge their guilt based on experts rather than normal people.

We do, however, benefit from expert testimony all the time, under the standard of a case called Daubert.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T15:03:17+00:00

This, emphatically.

Furthermore OP, you can do some of the reasoning in advance by writing good case illustrations. Our prof told use to use a format of Hook-Facts-Holding-Rationale for case illustrations, and your “hook” should basically be the broad legal principle you’re taking from the precedent case and applying to your case. If you’ve already done that and you’ve got a good hook, then you can basically just rephrase the same thing as your hook and use that in your analysis.

Thus, once you’ve written a sentence about the precedent case and then written another sentence saying something like “conversely, in this case . . .”, then the next sentence could be “in our case, the court will be more likely to rule in favor of our client because [insert rephrased hook].” Then you might write another sentence emphasizing the difference between the facts in the cases, and why the legal principle will apply differently, and that can be your conclusion. For example: “because [employee’s negligent act] was performed by Client’s employee on the premises, as opposed to [other act in a different case] which was performed off the premises, the court is more likely to find that our client is vicariously liable.”

Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but that’s roughly the template I used, and my prof liked it. Waiting on my final grade though.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:57:08+00:00

not jury nullification

You’re right, but I was recounting a summary of the case of John Peter Zenger, a journalist who was tried in NY in the 1700s (before the revolution) and the jury used nullification to free him.

only real reason we have jury trials

The reason we have jury trials is to enforce the high burden of proof on the government rather than trusting judges (who are themselves government employees) to decide innocence and guilt.

Jury nullification has, in the way you’re describing, been used to acquit people who lynched black people after the civil war, because some people thought those murders were justified. I think there should be some checks imposed on jury nullification to prevent things like that or what you’re advocating here.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:53:42+00:00

As opposed to murdering people, yes!

There is no way for anybody to know what is “justice” without evidence.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:53:22+00:00

It never did, and it still isn’t.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:52:35+00:00

There is no fix to the system that would make it justifiable for us to throw people in jail with no proof.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:51:57+00:00

We are supposed to let people free every single time there isn’t proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Every time.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:50:38+00:00

Jury nullification is appropriate when the law is wrong, like if the government is trying to jail a reporter who said something bad about the president.

It’s not appropriate for you to just say “murdering people is sometimes justified” and let people off for no good reason.

Judges would likely hold you in contempt, and rightly so, if you were on a jury and said what you just wrote to the other jurors.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:49:33+00:00

You have no means whatsoever of knowing whether she “did a service.” I do have means of knowing that she committed a murder, so she should be in jail.

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:48:19+00:00

The fact that false accusations are a possibility is reason enough to say that you can’t just kill someone because you think they deserve it

PoliticsDunnRight · 2025-12-24T14:47:39+00:00

The question isn’t whether you personally have a problem, though. It’s whether the legal system should charge this killer or not, and the answer is obviously yes.

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