The University of Cincinnati (UC) has reversed its initial reprimand of a professor who gave a student a failing grade on an assignment because she used the term “biological women.”
Fox News reports the reprimand was issued on June 14 by the head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UC, to penalize gender studies professor Melanie Nipper after she failed student Olivia Krolczyk’s assignment for citing biological science.
According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, Nipper’s reprimand will be removed from her personnel file. But she must still complete training about the university’s free speech policy and submit a course syllabus for the coming school year to her department head.
The outlet reported Nipper filed an appeal request and met on-campus with administrators. After the appeal request was filed, the UC decided that the reprimand was “issued in error.”
Nipper argued that her failing the student did not violate the school’s free speech policy.
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“University of Cincinnati’s decision to rescind the reprimand is an injustice to students everywhere,” Olivia Krolczyk said in a statement. “UC is affirming that professors will have no consequences for failing students with dissenting opinions. They will not uphold a student’s rights to free speech, and will take no action to ensure that the educators hired are acting in a professional manner.”
“At what point is the line drawn? What kind of example has the University just set? The University shouldn’t pick and choose which policies they decide to enforce based on whether the professor follows in line with their woke ideologies or goes against them,” Krolczyk continued.
“The school has solidified that using ‘biological’ is a harmful, transphobic, and outdated term,” the student noted.
“Congrats University of Cincinnati for contributing to the erasure of women and for letting future students know that they must conform to certain ideologies or else they will be punished,” Krolczyk concluded.
Krolczyk has received a new grade and finished her class with an A, according to Fox News.
Nipper had informed Krolczyk after grading her project proposal that the term “biological women” is an “exclusionary” phrase, as it allegedly reinforces “heteronormativity.” The professor told her student that she’d regrade the assignment if Krolczyk edited it to focus on “women’s rights (not just females),” according to The Christian Post.
Last May, Krolczyk posted a video to TikTok showing her assignment and Nipper’s comments. She asked her followers how she could finish her assignment without using the phrase “biological women.”
Krolczyk’s conflict comes amid the heated, ongoing national debate about biological men who identify as female, participating in women’s sports.
As CBN News has reported, studies have revealed that biological males competing against women have an unfair physiological advantage even with testosterone suppressants.
The peer-reviewed studies have confirmed that even with this treatment, athletes with biologically male DNA and physiology still have an unfair advantage when competing against biological women.
In 2022, two medical doctors went on record confirming that trans swimmer Lia Thomas, who previously competed for three years as a man at the University of Pennsylvania, gained an unfair advantage when allowed to compete against biological females, despite taking testosterone suppressants.
“There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it,” Dr. Michael J. Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, told The New York Times. “Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla.”
CBN News has reached out to UC for comment. We’ll post it here if we hear back.