On Friday, June 23, graduate workers walked out of a bargaining session with the University of Michigan’s Human Resources (HR), after HR refused to take responsibility for the latest sexual harassment scandal involving Professor Robert Stephenson’s abuse of two graduate students, reported on by the Michigan Daily on June 7. During negotiations, Garima Singh, Co-Chair of GEO’s Feminist Caucus, recounted the harrowing details of the case, in which the Equity, Civil Rights, and Title IX office (ECRT) dismissed, minimized, and misinterpreted evidence against Stephenson to find that he had not violated University policy. HR hid behind technicalities in an attempt to justify their proposal on harassment protections, which would not have protected Stephenson’s survivors. With multiple harassment survivors in the room, graduate workers grew frustrated with HR’s refusal to work with graduate students to solve the harassment crisis and voted to walk out. According to GEO President Jared Eno, “graduate workers walked out today because we are fed up with HR’s prioritization of arbitrary rules and procedures over the real-life experiences of workers—which only mirrors the institutional betrayals perpetrated by ECRT.”
