Professors File Landmark Suit Exposing Cover Up of Discrimination and Corruption at University of Michigan
Two highly-accomplished, award-winning faculty have filed a joint complaint against the University of Michigan for violations of the Michigan Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act based on race discrimination, gender discrimination, marital status discrimination, race hostile work environment, and retaliation; and violations of the Persons with Disabilities Civil Rights Act, for discriminatory hostile treatment and retaliation.
The complaint demonstrates that U-M’s highly publicized “diversity” campaigns are driven by self-serving rhetoric and false promises designed to deflect attention from serious and ongoing problems of institutional racism, underrepresentation of minority groups, and a hostile campus climate for marginalized groups. The complaint documents multiple instances in which university leaders acted to suppress complaints of discrimination and retaliate against faculty and students who reported both systemic patterns and individual acts of discrimination. It reveals misconduct and complicity by administrators from the departmental level to the highest ranks of the deans’ and provost’s offices, including UM’s chief diversity officer.
While on protected leave under the Family Medical Leave Act to care for a baby with Down syndrome in Winter 2015, Emily Lawsin, a professor in the Departments of American Culture and Women’s Studies, was sent a layoff notice with no prior warning and despite her strong teaching record dating back to 2000. Lawsin successfully contested that layoff, but the university again barred her from teaching during the current Winter 2017 Semester.
Scott Kurashige, formerly professor in the Department of American Culture, was terminated from his position as Director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program in December 2013 and was forced out of a tenured faculty position through a constructive termination in summer 2014 after successfully working at U-M for 14 years. Kurashige is one of 20 faculty of color, an alarming number, who left (with many forced out from) the small-to- medium sized Department of American Culture between 1997 and 2016.
Professor Lawsin requests reinstatement to her Lecturer IV faculty position without a “Remediation Plan.” Professor Kurashige requests that U-M reinstate him to his former positions of Professor with tenure and Director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program at an equitable salary reflecting his experience and achievements. Both request economic and non-economic damages and permanent injunctive relief to stop race/ethnic discrimination at U-M.
Professors Lawsin and Kurashige are represented by Alice Jennings, a partner in the law firm of Edwards & Jennings, PC, based in Detroit. The above summary provides highlights of the 74-page complaint—filed in Washtenaw County Circuit Court on December 5, 2016.
University of Michigan LSA Dean Promotes Ignorance of A/PIAs
If you are worried that the dissemination of “alternative facts” is undermining intelligent discourse and threatening our democracy, we advise you to pay closer to attention to LSA’s attempts to eliminate and distort the history of Asian/Pacific Islander Americans (A/PIA) at U-M.
Recently (Friday, March 10), LSA Dean Andrew Martin sent an email for mass distribution in which he announced “the first-ever campus-wide convening of students, faculty, and staff for an afternoon of informal meet-and-greet networking, information sharing, and structured conversations on issues of concern to Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities across campus.”
Apparently, Dean Martin has just discovered the A/PIA community the same way Columbus “discovered” America. The flyer Martin attached says the summit will discuss the “History of APIAs at U-M.” However, his misleading announcement suggests this will be a whitewashing of history.
As members of a network of A/PIA alumni and former student leaders, we are here to tell Martin that our community has convened dozens of campus-wide gatherings of student, staff, and faculty for over four decades. Not coincidentally, overcoming LSA’s lack of support for A/PIA Studies and lack of awareness of A/PIA concerns has been a central impetus for these regular convenings.
To erase the history of A/PIA organizing at U-M is to ignore the collective struggles we have fought against Eurocentrism, hate crimes, and institutional racism, while fighting for ethnic studies, affirmative action, and social justice. This erasure reinforces the model minority stereotype of Asians as passive and conservative, thus fostering divisions between the A/PIA community and other communities of color.
In recent years, A/PIA students, faculty, and staff organized a series of campus-wide summits, conferences, and events in response to LSA’s failure to retain A/PIA Studies faculty, which reached a crisis point starting in 2011. Within an eight-month period, the United Asian American Organizations, the A/PIA Studies Program, and Multi-ethnic Studies Affairs convened two summits, one strategy session, one community conversation, and an Asian American activism conference, where five hundred attendees addressed both campus and community issues.
Participants included prominent A/PIA scholars, artists, organizers, and off-campus leaders, including a U.S. congressman and a state senator. Two presenters have since been elected to the Michigan House of Representatives and Philadelphia City Council. These gatherings also addressed the lack of space for A/PIA and student of color organizations on campus, as well as the problem of a hostile campus climate.
To pretend that events of this magnitude never happened demonstrates either profound audacity or a supreme level of ignorance that should disqualify oneself from leadership in education. But why is LSA trying so hard to erase this history? We have some ideas:
When students don’t know how vibrant A/PIA Studies used to be, it is easier for LSA to pretend as if its new diversity plan is breaking new ground rather than peddling old rhetoric.
Setting low expectations makes it easier for LSA to defend its poor decision-making regarding leadership choices for the A/PIA Studies Program and Department of American Culture, which lost 20 faculty of color from 1997 to 2016.
Dean Martin and LSA are covering up their own roles in undermining faculty of color and ethnic studies. The university is currently the defendant in a landmark suit by two highly successful, award-winning faculty, who cite U-M’s own documents to reveal how prior LSA deans and senior faculty opposed ethnic studies and favored white professors with thin resumes to lead American Culture.
If he wants to believe he is so committed to diversity and the A/PIA community, Dean Martin should retract this alternative facts and implement the five demands we presented in November 2016, and reinstate Professors Kurashige and Lawsin immediately, giving them the resources needed to restore A/PIA Studies at U-M. If he will not do this, we challenge Martin—a quantitative researcher—to show us the data that on A/PIA Studies activity (e.g. student enrollment and involvement, fundraising, public events, local/national awards, media coverage) before and after Professor Kurashige’s termination and explain the discrepancy.
(A version of this statement is also featured in the Michigan in Color section of the Michigan Daily)
As Asian/Pacific Islander American students and alumni of the University of Michigan, we are called to action as we witness everything we love about our campus and nation coming under assault. We are moved to join with and help lead the majority of Wolverines and Americans who say “no” to racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, religious intolerance, ableism and bigotry of all kinds. “Go Blue” must be a rallying cry for democracy, for social justice and for science and education in the public interest.
Our open letter was published in the Michigan Daily, University of Michigan’s student paper. Support the alumni petition to strengthen A/PIA Studies!
For over two decades, the University of Michigan Asian/Pacific Islander American (A/PIA) Studies Program has drawn local and national acclaim for its mission to educate and empower students, while drawing attention to critical issues that impact Asian American and Pacific Islander communities on and off campus. While the A/PIA Studies Program was never granted more than a tiny fraction of the resources other programs and departments received, we made creative use of what we had to build a sense of community within a historically-white institution where people of color are routinely marginalized. Rooted in the struggles and sacrifices of our communities and our ancestors, students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community supporters fought to build up the program as a vital space to develop critical anti-racist strategies and advance movements for social justice.
Tragically, this has all been undermined by the university over the past 1.5 years. This is part of a pattern of U-M paying lip service to “diversity” while failing to take actual steps to achieve equity. The attacks on A/PIA Studies are an increasingly common sign of institutional racism, corruption, and opportunism in the corporate university. They will ultimately harm the entire university and damage its reputation, as one of the key sites of student success and leadership development evaporates.
It has become evident that the people put in charge of running the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA) and the Department of American Culture (AC) have no commitment to preserving what we all built—let alone providing the kind of expansion that we all know is needed. A/PIA Studies has no dedicated staff or office space, and it needs more classes, more faculty, and a real budget.
The result is that A/PIA Studies is nearly defunct. We need to make this as clear as can be: the organizing of A/PIA Studies programs or events has nearly ceased for three semesters running.
What is now at stake is the permanent loss of what all of us have created.
SEVERE CUTS TO FACULTY A/PIA
Studies has lost 6 full-time faculty members whose expertise has not been replaced. For example, there is not a single scholar of Asian American or Pacific Islander history among the roughly 80 professors in the History Department. There are no professors whose research and teaching focus on Chinese, Korean, or Southeast Asian Americans. Furthermore, U-M has made minimal effort to retain A/PIA faculty and has generally not come close to matching offers from other universities. Attempts to hire prominent professors from other universities have repeatedly been blocked, including two attempts to hire the first Vietnamese American Studies specialist and one to hire the first expert on Muslim Asian Americans. Undergrad and grad students have lost critical mentors. The voices of faculty who were most devoted to the program are gone, and the few remaining faculty have been silent and inactive in the face of this crisis.
LOSS OF A/PIA STUDIES CLASSES
A/PIA Studies curriculum has gone from offering 8-10 classes per semester to 2 classes in Winter 2015, taught by temporary lecturers. While there are 6 classes scheduled for Fall 2015, 2 of these are being taught by a non-tenure track lecturer whom U-M tried to layoff earlier this year. All A/PIA Studies classes are subject to approval by the AC department. Despite strong student demand, the chair of AC has refused to offer classes like “Chinese American Experience” or “US-India Relations” even when there were funds and qualified instructors available. Scholarship and internship programs we created have also died. Moreover, A/PIA Studies grad students have lost opportunities to take grad seminars and receive training as GSIs in A/PIA Studies.
Three years ago, U-M hired the chair of the Asian American Studies Department at the University of Illinois with the intention that this professor would help rebuild A/PIA Studies at U-M. This professor has received a salary raise from $104,000 to over $136,000 per year (with generous additional benefits) making her far and away the highest paid A/PIA Studies professor in U-M history. (No one else has even earned six figures.) However, she has broken agreements made with the program by refusing to teach a single course focused on Asian Americans and playing almost no role in developing the program. With A/PIA Studies enrollment and minors plummeting, the administration now has the excuse it needs to permanently marginalize the program.
DEATH OF LONGSTANDING PUBLIC PROGRAMS AND ACTIVISM
A/PIA Studies had a long-standing tradition of organizing regular events to serve the community and raise awareness about social issues like hate crimes, the “model minority” stereotype, and institutional racism. The Fall Welcome Reception and HolidAPA (to celebrate student achievement and activism) were held continuously since 2000 but ended in 2013. These events drew hundreds of students, featured internationally renowned scholars and public speakers like Grace Lee Boggs and Maya Soetoro-Ng (President Obama’s sister). They built relationships with community activists in the Ann Arbor/Detroit region. Students played leading roles in organizing major conferences and interacting with guest speakers (rather than the traditional U-M faculty method of taking the speakers to dinner at a fancy restaurant with a few faculty). However, the program organized only one public event in 2014-2015 —one that featured the director’s close friend. No thought has been put into doing more, and no effort has been made to solicit student involvement or address student concerns.
TOP-DOWN CONTROL BY WHITE ADMINISTRATORS
A/PIA Studies was a long-standing LSA program and written policies state that the A/PIA Studies director must be appointed by the Dean of LSA. In violation of the department’s own by-laws, the AC chair secretly negotiated a deal with LSA to demote A/PIA Studies from being a college-level program formally governed by the dean’s office to a department-level program. This means that both the A/PIA program and the directorship have no autonomy, solid foundation, or long-term security. The director serves entirely as an underling of the chair of Department of American Culture, currently Professor June Howard. This diminishes the entire program and puts it fate in the hands of people who lack the expertise or concern to serve it properly. While brushing off concerned students, faculty, and alumni, Howard has made a series of rash and secret decisions that have gutted the program. The primary concern of Howard and her predecessor (another white professor, Greg Dowd) has been to silence or push away A/PIA Studies faculty and students who have exposed the problem of white privilege and institutional racism within AC and U-M.
Howard naively seems to think that we will accept any director who “looks” Asian or Pacific Islander regardless of their actual leadership qualities or lack thereof. The fact is that there is no public record of A/PIA Studies holding any meetings since January 2014. The director has been almost entirely inaccessible and for long stretches of time has even failed to answer emails. Funds and resources are being squandered or idled. At a student-organized event in Winter 2015, the director suddenly announced she was resigning, but apparently Howard later convinced her to reverse this decision. While Howard now says she wants input from others in rebuilding the program, what is clear that any rebuilding process which involves her is tainted and doomed to fail.
STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS SHUT OUT OF THE PROGRAM
At the height of its success, students played a central role in planning and implementation of the program’s activities. Faculty coordinated regularly with student leaders and activists in organizations like UAAO, AAA, SAAN, and the Coalition for Tuition Equality. They attended meetings and conferences that extended into late nights and weekends. They developed internships and service programs like Detroit Asian Youth Project for students to get organizing experience off-campus. All of this was done without additional compensation because anyone fortunate to be an Ethnic Studies professor should pay forward all the work and struggle that was done to open doors for our generation. This entire spirit of service and student-faculty collaboration has disappeared.
One terrible sign of disregard for student concerns, community support, and labor rights was the AC department’s abrupt cancellation of a Winter 2014 A/PIA Studies class and the callous layoff of a local community activist hired to teach it. That the course cancelled was “Asian Americans and Civil Rights” taught students all they needed to know about the university’s true values.
THE FUTURE OF A/PIA STUDIES?
As Michigan alumni and former students of A/PIA Studies, we are deeply concerned the systemic dismantling of A/PIA Studies by the administration, particularly in the wake of Prop 2 and the continued assault on access to higher education at a national level. Strong ethnic studies programs not only promote diversity, but also improve campus climate for students of color. Any meaningful effort to rebuild A/PIA Studies by the university must integrate student involvement and alumni input at its forefront, or else the process is simply not legitimate.
