After nearly six days, senior Lindsay Wrobel has ended her hunger strike.
Wrobel broke her strike after Public Safety Chief Mark Fisher hand-delivered to Wrobel the statement the Board of Trustees emailed to the UR community. Wrobel was given the statement before the email was sent out to the rest of the University.
Wrobel celebrated by eating a moon cookie and drinking a red Naked juice and a Gatorade at Connections late Tuesday afternoon.
“This was the hardest week of my life,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “That cookie was the best-tasting thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.”
Wrobel said that she decided to end her hunger strike since she received confirmation that students would be on the newly appointed special committee to investigate the claims made in the EEOC complaint against UR. The Campus Times has not confirmed this.
“We did it,” Wrobel said at Connections. “I’m feeling like this for sure victory, but we still have a lot of work to do.”
Wrobel, one of the students leading the actions in protest of the University’s treatment of Professor T. Florian Jaeger, went on hunger strike at midnight last Thursday in protest of the University’s handling of the EEOC complaint.
This all comes after last week’s revelations that a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint had been filed against UR by several current and former faculty members, as well as a former grad student.
The complaint, first reported on by Mother Jones, details how UR left Prof. T. Florian Jaeger untouched after he was accused by Celeste Kidd, another professor and former graduate student under Jaeger, of years of sexual harassment. According to the document, Kidd was one of 17 professors and students to complain about Jaeger’s behavior.
The complaint primarily argues that UR retaliated against the employees who had come forward about Jaeger’s alleged harassment. The federal commission will not rule on anything related directly to students or allegations of harassment.
Editor’s Note (12/22/19): A sentence saying that, according to the EEOC complaint, Kidd’s account of harassment was supported by seven professors and 11 students was changed to reflect that Kidd was one of those professors and one of those students. The sentence was also changed to reflect that, according to the complaint, not all of the individuals necessarily supported Kidd’s account of her own experience, but complained about Jaeger’s behavior as they experienced it.
