Meg Wilson, a graduate student in the Department of Earth, Environmental, & Planetary Sciences (DEEPS) is being unfairly forced out of her program. DEEPS has failed to provide necessary accommodations for Meg’s protected status under the ADA. Her department has held her to unequal and contradictory standards, impeding her dissertation research and jeopardizing her chance to complete her doctorate. Most troublingly, her department has retaliated against her for requesting accommodations, a matter which is currently under investigation by the U.S. Dept. of Education.

Having exhausted every formal option to work together with the University in resolving this situation, we call upon the Graduate School and DEEPS to ensure that Meg has a fair chance to pursue her degree. We demand that Brown lives up to its stated goals of making the Graduate School truly inclusive and accessible. As such, we the undersigned call upon Brown University and the Department of Earth, Environmental, & Planetary Sciences to:

1.     Restore Meg to satisfactory academic standing, rescinding her academic warning letter.
2.     Provide Meg with a sixth year of funding, as she had to change research advisors and topics.
3.     Ensure that Meg’s salary for the spring semester is paid in full, including any back pay for time she was off payroll, and reinstate her as a paid TA as outlined in her graduate appointment letter.

What’s the Full Story?

Meg was told numerous times, both orally and in writing, that she was on track to graduate with positive semester reviews, and her committee passed her on the first chapter of her thesis and qualifying exams. She was suddenly told this past spring that her work was insufficient for a graduate program, including her previously passed thesis chapter, after which she was placed on academic warning. It is unheard of for any PhD student to pass a thesis chapter, and then have it be revoked later.

Meg’s academic status letter came with a list of requirements and associated deadlines that did not match the expectations for other students in her department. These new requirements were outside the realm of department guidelines for graduate students. One such example was the inclusion of a publication requirement, which is not mandated for DEEPS graduate students. After Meg’s appeal, the department removed this condition as it was not a requirement for her program, highlighting the arbitrary nature of the warning letter.

Upon being warned of her change in academic status, Meg immediately met with Student Accessibility Services (SAS), for which she has been registered since coming to Brown. Although the department was unable to explain their requirements to SAS, the department resisted providing any accommodations, forcing Meg to escalate the issue to the ADA coordinator at Brown. In the meantime, Meg’s department interfered with her access to the research lab, preventing her from being able to continue her experiments. She was finally granted an extension accommodation only the day before the deadline her department had set for her work, forcing her to work the entirety of the summer without giving her a chance to make use of this accommodation.

Meg was placed on academic warning again last Fall, and was again given unrealistic expectations for remaining in the program. Meg contacted SAS on August 31, the day she received her second academic warning letter, about further program accommodations, as she no longer had an advisor in her field. Neither SAS nor DEEPS told her whether the accommodations she requested had been approved until October 25, well after multiple deadlines set in her warning letter had already passed. The extraordinary delays in Meg’s request for a decision from SAS again made her accommodations unworkable.

Despite being proactive in requesting accommodations for her disability, Meg was met with resistance and retaliation for doing so. As her situation developed, other graduate students in DEEPS wrote, signed, and distributed an open letter voicing their concerns. In addition, a tenured faculty member from a separate department, familiar with Meg’s situation, wrote to the dean of the graduate school and called Meg’s situation a “significant injustice.” The lack of support and contradictory feedback Meg has received has deprived her of a reasonable chance to pursue her PhD.

Meg and her colleagues supporting her have made every effort to resolve this issue and help her get back to work. She has spoken with every university office tasked with supporting graduate students in exactly these kinds of situations, and at every turn the University has failed her. We ask you to stand with Meg and the countless colleagues, friends and faculty who support her.