Last week I dropped my complaint against UConn for age discrimination practices in exchange for a promise by their counsel to address the issues involved.
I received the following email from Nicole Fournier Gelston, General Counsel at UCONN.
Dear Mr. Krasicki-
We appreciate your agreeing to engage in the pre-answer conciliation process with respect to your complaint. As we shared with Mr. Cobb, we regret that the information you received regarding UConn's policy with respect to the Senior Tuition Waiver was not accurate. The Senior Tuition Waiver applies to both undergraduate and graduate program tuition.
We are committed to taking steps to ensure individuals responsible for or otherwise involved in the admissions processes are fully informed that the waiver applies to undergraduate and graduate level programs. We are also committed to ensuring "Seniors" have clear and complete information.
Toward those ends, an email communication will be sent to remind individuals involved in the admissions processes of the applicability of the waiver. In addition, the policy on the University Bursar website will be revised to include a statement that the Senior Tuition Waiver applies to both undergraduate and graduate program tuition.
We apologize for any inconvenience this misinformation caused you.
Sincerely,
Nicole Fournier Gelston
cc: Dr. Kent Holsinger, Graduate School Dean
The letter has virtually nothing to do with the complaint itself but okay UConn has no interest in correcting the glaring and blatant discriminatory practices I outlined in detail in the complaint. In fact this letter and the pre-answer process was a futile exercise, IMO but, again, okay - UConn is incapable of intelligently responding to the issues at hand.
To that end I drafted and sent a letter that outlined my expectations of what needs to be resolved for individuals applying to any State Higher Education institution using the tuition waiver.
Here was my response.
RE: CHRO Case: 2440052
Dear Ms. Gelston,
This is a letter of acknowledgment of our pre-answer conciliation agreement.
Please attach this as my understanding of your responsibilities in understanding and accepting responsibility for resolving the issues I raised.
All State faculty need to be aware of the law. I filed the complaint against UConn because it is the state’s flagship institution and claims to be a research institution. As such, it needs not only to model its educational architecture to honor this law, it also needs to to advocate its adoption to all institutions that are affected by it.
My complaint further documented the fact that any State law that ensures the rights of any minority group can be systemically neutered through adversarial bureaucratic complexity. More specifically, older students are not necessarily contiguously engaged with educational institutions. When asked for academic references, most of my closest and most complementary mentors are dead. When you require that elders attempting to take advantage of free tuition contact faculty, you are asking older people to somehow contact, busy and difficult to contact individuals, for an exception to attending their (unwelcoming?) class.
This faculty contact request and response dynamic needs to be made uniform and transparent to all involved and it needs to be that way statewide. This, yet another opportunity for UConn to lead.
This is nothing less than a discriminatory request and obstacle to equitable participation. This process needs re-imagination and reform. Our reconciliation cannot force you to change any of this but your existing model of class registration is a textbook model of how systemic discrimination is practiced in a multitude of social practices. In your capacity as legal counsel I hope you make it loud and clear that this is a research topic that needs to be studied and corrected statewide.
The fact that Connecticut offers free tuition to older workers is a lost opportunity under existing practice.
There is already a nationwide debate about the cost of education that needs no further explanation. And in a gig economy where older workers often find themselves unemployed and whose skills are antiquated, Connecticut is offering free up-skilling opportunities is a business magnet assuming the State’s Higher Education institutions bothered not only advocating its availability but recognizing its potential to complement business needs or celebrating its authentic, no-social-engineering-required, diversity.
Finally, though my complaint is being dismissed, the facts I presented were true and actionable. In other words, you can responsibly examine the material provided or not. But if CHRO is alerted to the same charges anytime in the near future then this case should remain a part of the institutional memory that UConn was made aware of the issues, promised to remediate them, and didn’t take it seriously.
Regards,
Frank W. Krasicki
cc: Dr. Kent Gelston, Zachary Cobb, Uconn Board of Trustees
In a correspondence before this meeting I alerted them to the following additional context for the complaint.
Frank Krasicki krasicki@gmail.com
Thu, Sep 7, 12:41 PM
Two points of interest from: https://law.justia.com/codes/connecticut/2015/title-46a/ chapter-814c/section-46a-83
"(i) After finding that there is reasonable cause to believe that a discriminatory practice has been or is being committed as alleged in the complaint, an investigator shall attempt to eliminate the practice complained of by conference, conciliation and persuasion not later than fifty days after the date of the finding. The refusal to accept a settlement shall not be grounds for dismissal of any complaint."
"(m) The executive director or the executive director’s designee may enter an order of dismissal against a complainant who (1) after notice and without good cause, fails to attend a fact-finding conference; (2) after notice and without good cause, fails to attend a mandatory mediation conference; or (3) refuses to accept an offer of settlement where the respondent has eliminated the discriminatory practice complained of, taken steps to prevent a like occurrence in the future and offered full relief to the complainant."My interpretation of this legal contradiction is that the elimination of the discriminatory practice is optional based on the discretion of the respondent. My complaint rests on the fact that the practices employed by UConn are wholly illegal, unethical, and unacceptable. The practice must be remediated to comply with the spirit, intent, and goodwill interpretation of anti-discrimination law.Some demographic context based on a lightweight google search:
Search for: What percentage of the population is over 50 in the US?
How many senior citizens are in Connecticut?The state, the seventh oldest in the country, has nearly 590,000 people over age 65 and the most diverse (17.5%) older population in New England. More than 28% of people over 65 live alone and more than 66% of those over 85 are women."Definition of Elder Abuse
What age is considered elderly in the state of Connecticut?
(ages 60+)
ELDER ABUSE UNDER CONNECTICUT LAW
Elder abuse also includes neglect, exploitation, and/or abandonment of an elderly (ages 60+) person.Finally, another recent example of potential UConn discriminatory practice that make violate NCAA rules, money laundering or kickback law, or other less than scrupulous DEI practice:"How many scholarship players can a NCAA basketball team have?13 scholarships
In NCAA Division 1 basketball, coaches can offer a maximum of 13 scholarships per team. These are called headcount scholarships, also known as full-ride scholarships. The average NCAA Division 1 team rosters 16 athletes, so there might be three players on the team who walked on and don't qualify for athletic aid.""The Star Kids Kathy and Geno Auriemma Scholarship supports undergraduate student-athletes who are members of the women’s basketball team, with preference given to students demonstrating financial need""regards,Frank Krasicki
There is no excuse for UConn being unaware of these glaring issues nor for negligently and, for all intents and purposes, maliciously ignoring the aging population of Connecticut while employing an army of DEI officers statewide dedicated to everyone else but the elderly as individuals who need their attention.
I encourage anyone who, going forward, experiences similar experiences in any State Higher Education institution to contact the Connecticut Human Rights and Opportunities Commission - they'll evaluate your problem fairly and armed with complaints such as mine will be armed to ask the right questions.
No comments:
Post a Comment