The University of Oklahoma has told a student her final grade will remain intact despite receiving a zero on an essay about gender — a score that sparked claims of religious discrimination and added fuel to tensions at American colleges.

University officials announced this week that the student’s instructor has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into the incident. The probe was launched after OU’s Turning Point USA chapter posted about the case on social media, generating more than 44 million views. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt publicly called on the university to investigate the matter.

“The University of Oklahoma takes seriously concerns involving First Amendment rights, certainly including religious freedoms,” an OU spokesperson wrote in an email to the Washington Post. “Upon receiving notice from the student on the grading of an assignment in the online class, the University immediately reached out to the student, began a full review of the situation, and acted swiftly to address the matter.”

The student, Samantha Fulnecky, was assigned a 650-word essay for a psychology course analyzing an article on gender, peer relations, and mental health. In her essay, she rejected the concept of multiple genders and cited the Bible to support her view that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes.

“Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth,” she wrote in the essay, adding that she hoped young Americans, “would not believe the lies being spread from Satan that make them believe they are better off as another gender than what God made them.”

In screenshots shared by the TPUSA, graduate student instructor Mel Curth apparently wrote that while Ms. Fulnecky was entitled to her beliefs, using them to argue against the article’s findings “is not best practice.” 

Her instructor also stated the failing grade was not based on her beliefs but because the paper “does not answer the questions for the assignment, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.”

The Trump administration and other Republican leaders have intensified their campaigns this year to reshape higher education, targeting an array of cultural issues like DEI and antisemitism in addition to gender identity.

On Wednesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon participated in a White House event titled, “Biased Professors, Woke Administrators, and the End of Free Inquiry on U.S. Campuses,” which brought together university and political leaders to discuss leftist “ideological capture” of higher education and efforts to address it.

Earlier this fall, Texas A&M University fired one of its instructors and removed a dean and department head from their positions after a video went viral showing a student accusing an instructor of illegally teaching “gender ideology.” The university’s president, Mark A. Welsh was forced to step down a few days later.