Dear fellow graduate student workers,
On Friday, February 17, 2023, members of various campus communities at MIT - the Black Graduate Students Association (BGSA), the Latinx Graduate Student Association (LGSA), LGBTQ Grad, the DEI Committee of the Graduate Student Council (GSC DEI), and current student alums of the MIT Summer Research Program - sat across the bargaining table from various MIT administrators and lawyers hired to represent MIT. We shared powerful, emotional, and brutally honest statements presenting our own and fellow students’ experiences facing harassment, discrimination, and bullying at MIT.
To deal with incidents of harassment and discrimination like this, the institute currently presents Institute Harassment and Discrimination Response (IDHR) as the only path for recourse, stating that it is indeed trusted by the grad population. How can this be the case when a survey run by the Association of American Universities reports that 39.4% of grad students reported experiencing harassing behavior, yet less than 1% utilized IDHR?