Women come out in support for UNC amid racial discrimination suit

Recent graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s business school wrote an open letter after another former grad student, Rose Brown, filed a lawsuit claiming racial discrimination.

Recent graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s business school are showing their support for their alma mater in an open letter after another former grad student, Rose Brown, filed a lawsuit against faculty and university, claiming she was kicked out of the program after reporting alleged racial discrimination.

In the letter, obtained exclusively by NBC News, Angelica Leigh, Ayana Younge, Chaitali Kapadia and Erin Long said they don’t want to “diminish” Brown’s claims, but simply want to highlight their positive experience in the Kenan-Flagler Business School’s organizational behavior doctoral program. The women praised the business school’s commitment to diversity and wrote that the three professors named in Brown’s lawsuit — Shimul Melwani, Sreedhari Desai and Michael Christian — were “supportive” and did all they could to help the women complete the program. 

“We are writing this letter because we are concerned with the characterization of the department that has been reported in the media,” the letter read. “We cannot speak to everyone’s views about UNC or Kenan-Flagler, nor do we seek to diminish the experiences of others, but we can share our perspective and experience of the culture of the OB department’s Ph.D. program.”

The letter comes weeks after Brown filed the lawsuit in late August against the professors, the university and its board of governors. The lawsuit alleges that Melwani, Desai or Christian belittled her competence, scolded her after she was sexually assaulted, instructed her to underpay Black research participants, and encouraged her to promote stereotypes about “Black-on-Black” mistreatment in her research. Brown alleged she was dismissed from the organizational behavior program after she reported to the university’s Equal Opportunity and Compliance office that she’d experienced racial discrimination for the entirety of her first year of the five-year program.

“It was torture in a lot of ways,” Brown told NBC News. “I was ostracized from a faculty standpoint. I was continuously berated with various comments.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/women-come-support-unc-racial-discrimination-suit-rcna49397

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