Former UNC-Chapel Hill student alleges racial discrimination in lawsuit

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September 16, 2022

By Char Adams, NBC News

Rose Brown was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill (Peak City Headshots)

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is under fire after a Black former graduate student sued, accusing faculty members at the university’s business school of racial discrimination and retaliation in her lawsuit.

Rose Brown alleges in the lawsuit, filed last month in the U.S. District Court for North Carolina’s Middle District, that some faculty members at the university’s Kenan-Flagler Business School belittled her competence, scolded her after she was sexually assaulted, and encouraged her to underpay Black research participants, all before pushing her out of the school’s Ph.D. program, according to the lawsuit.

“It was torture in a lot of ways. I was ostracized from a faculty standpoint. I was continuously berated with various comments,” Brown, 28, told NBC News. “ It was humiliating. It was disheartening. It broke me down every day. I had panic attacks every time I went to school.”

[…]

Along with the university and its board of governors, the suit names professors Shimul Melwani, Sreedhari Desai and Michael Christian. Christian and Desai were Brown’s principal advisers, and Melwani, a coordinator of the Ph.D. program, was responsible for her annual student review, according to the suit.

Brown’s lawsuit alleges several examples of discrimination by people at the school.

Black Americans face racial discrimination, from being forced to cut their hair to receiving low real estate appraisals.

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