Content Warning: This story contains references to sexual assault.
A former Ph.D. student in the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School filed a lawsuit this week, accusing the university and three of the school’s professors of racial discrimination and suing for damages from retaliation.
A lawsuit by Rose Brown, a North Carolina native who enrolled at UNC in late 2020, alleges faculty in the business school’s organizational behavior program treated her differently from other students when requesting extension on projects, pursuing project ideas and reporting complaints to the Equal Opportunity Compliance Office. Brown is seeking to recover damages for “mental anguish, severe emotional distress, financial loss, and pain and suffering,” from her experience in the program through June 2021 and the effects on her career afterward.
Brown’s attorneys, who say she was the only Black woman in the specific Ph.D. program at UNC’s business school, submitted the lawsuit to a federal court in the Middle District of North Carolina on Wednesday. According to the filing, Brown claims she experienced discrimination from a trio of Kenan-Flagler faculty members: Michael Christian, Shimul Melwani and Sreedhari Desai, all of whom are organizational behavior professors. Christian and Desai served as principle academic advisors for Brown, while Melwani was the Ph.D. program coordinator. Organizational behavior is the study of the processes within businesses and how employees interact to create a workplace culture.
Among the examples listed in the lawsuit, Brown alleges she was pushed away from projects on topics like “code-switching,” or the variation of speech styles when speaking with other races — and had several projects shelved under the direction of the faculty. She reports the faculty attempted to shift the focus of how Black employees interact with colleagues to any “Black-on-Black peer pressure in the workplace,” which the former UNC student said was “inconsistent” with her own objectives.
Brown also reports being a sexual assault victim diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which was triggered by separate rapes in August and September 2020. Her lawsuit claims that when requesting extended time for projects because of her PTSD — which she alerted her professors about — the requests were held against her, unlike how extensions for her white colleagues were treated. The lawsuit also says when Brown traveled to court to file a Domestic Violence Protection Order, Melwani and Christian pointed to her absence from a non-mandatory seminar as a point of contention.
“Rather than acting empathetically,” reads the lawsuit, “both Melwani and Christian admonished her for not attending the seminar, one of them stating that Ms. Brown was being ‘disrespectful’ for failing to attend an event they had taken time to organize.”
In June 2021, Brown says she planned to file a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Compliance Office and alerted incoming Ph.D. advisor Matthew Pearsall of her plans. During her annual review a month later, the former UNC student said she was met by both Pearsall and Christian sharing they did not believe she had “a path forward in the Ph.D. program” despite citing no issues with her research efforts.
“Pearsall and Christian further stated that Ms. Brown had ‘burned bridges with faculty’ to the point that it was unlikely she could form a dissertation committee to satisfy her doctorate requirements,” reads the lawsuit. “Such a committee was at least three years in Ms. Brown’s future.”
At that point, Brown remained in the organizational behavior program as a masters student and received the results of what she claims is a “flawed” investigation by the Equal Opportunity Compliance Office. The lawsuit says the office’s findings “ignored the initial focus of Ms. Brown’s complaints of racial insensitivity and discriminatory conduct in favor of a narrow inquiry into whether the review process was influenced by knowledge of the EOC investigation.”
The lawsuit is the latest example of criticism UNC has faced when it comes to the handling of racial equity and diversity on campus. The school fell under national scrutiny in 2020 over the delayed approval of tenure to Pulitzer-prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was a prospective professor for the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The flagship campus for the UNC System was also at the center of controversy when it came to the future of the Confederate memorial known as Silent Sam. The UNC Board of Governors initially negotiated a $2.5 million settlement fund for the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization to take the statue before a court ruled the university itself owned the memorial. More recently, the American Association of University Professors approved a measure condemning the university for its systemic racism and threats to academic freedom.
In a statement to Chapelboro about Wednesday’s lawsuit, UNC Media Relations said, “We are aware of these allegations but unable to comment on the pending litigation at this time. UNC-Chapel Hill strives to provide a positive educational experience for all our students.”
Mewani, Christian and Desai each did not respond to a requests for comment by Chapelboro.
Photo via Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill.
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