PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Ed Fails
by Sudhama Ranganathan Saturday, Mar. 10, 2012 at 8:26 PM
uconnharassment@gmail.com

When I was a student at the University of Connecticut between the years of 2003 and 2006, I experienced harassment due to a combination of my race and my involvement in a violent student protest thirteen years prior to my attending UConn. The time of my enrollment at UConn put me at the school two years after the occurrence of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Tensions were high and I had already dealt with plenty of harassment because of my race alone as a result. Though I didn't agree with it, I let it roll off my back up to a point – anyone that looked in any way as though they could have been from the Middle East had to deal with it to a certain extent following the attacks if they were living in this country knows exactly what I mean. It was to an extent the reality and had to live in it.

What was odd and peculiar to the situation withing the degree program at UConn from the start was the part of the harassment that came from my involvement in a protest from my days in high school thirteen years prior. It wasn't something well known and would have had to have been researched. Further, to anyone that had known it, they also would have known that it had nothing to do with Muslim fundamentalist extremism or any religion for that matter. The protests were related to the brutal system of oppression used by the South African government at the time to oppress the black population of that country.

The issue was front and center across the country at the time, 1990, and there were benefit rock concerts featuring big name acts across the country, songs, movies and more that were born out of people's views on the matter. Even high school students like myself watched news programs about what was happening in South Africa and felt the wish they too could help in some small way.

Unfortunately for myself I got involved with some students at a college in my hometown that were much older and experienced than me and participated in a violent protest that started out being planned to be peaceful, but took a wrong turn somewhere. I was even warned after the protest that I should stay away from the two students that planned the violent protests, Kofi and Nicholas, by a close associate of theirs at the school because according to them they were in fact undercover law enforcement. After confronting them and them both denying it I ignored that, though I no longer participated in such protests again after that. I had come to the conclusion afterwards, though I cared about the issues, I had gone about the protest in the wrong way.

I got caught and also due to pressure from my family and my naivete at the time, I turned states evidence and testified against Kofi. The other person, Nicholas, had been killed in a drug deal gone bad in Hartford, Ct. before there was a court case.

Fast forward to 2003 and I entered the degree program I wanted to major in. I started getting harassed pretty early on especially noticeably by one specific professor. There was some small stuff from other people but nothing I couldn't let roll off my back. I figured it was just post 9-11 hyper sensitivity and I figured I was just as shocked, saddened and angered as anyone because of the attacks in New York and in time people would see I was nothing like that. That's how it had been since 9-11 and so I just buckled down, focused on my degree and stayed true to myself.

However, the one professor didn't let up for whatever reasons. I couldn't figure it out as he had made comments to me during one on one conversations that made it clear he knew about my past and had issues with it, but if he had done any research at all he would have known since that time I had not been involved with anything like that or even remotely political or violent. My record had remained clean and though the incident left me a convicted felon, having been tried as an adult to make an example out of me, my record was so spotless since then I was able to be bonded by the federal government with regards to employment.

I didn't get it, but thought he would change his mind over time. I was wrong. Not only didn't he change his mind, but he got worse and worse pulling in certain students from my major to help under the same banner used to fool the nation into agreeing to invade Iraq – a false notion of patriotic duty. It seemed absurd since my crimes were not related to a feeling of being anti-American, just anti-racism. I guess some things hadn't changed since the sixties and seventies and there were still people that felt such things were anti-white or anti-American and in certain cases both and apparently that professor was that kind of person.

In the program there were certain students that were either neutral with the behavior or outright opposed to it. Once such student appearing to be that way was a classmate of mine named Eduardo and everyone just referred to him as “Ed.” Ed tried early on to befriend me and seemed to run hot and cold. I figured that was just his personality. He would at times be on board with the harassing behavior and at others seemed sympathetic to me in terms of my being the target of the harassment.

He would indicate to me that the reasoning was that he wanted to graduate and not get harassed too badly himself or have his grades drop. As this was a real likelihood for people that either sided with me or at times that refused to go along with the harassment of myself, I just either gave him a pass or found some other way to deal with it. I did the same for others that were forced into harassing me. They needed to graduate and in the end it wasn't their responsibility.

However my view of Ed, and what was happening at UConn to me, changed when Ed admitted he was woking on campus for law enforcement. He told me this as a way to try and dissuade me from pursuing a formal complaint and then possible outside legal actions against the school, which I told him I had discussed with some people.

I gathered he wanted to try and elicit some sympathy as he confessed further that he had been working in this capacity on campus for roughly eight years and expressed to me that if I went public his work could be exposed. There was also the underlying implicit threat that comes with such a revelation. He also pointed out other people; including one in particular that was on campus in the same capacity and how she would be exposed also.

Needless to say that did not do the trick. It didn't endear him to me because the whole premise for my giving him a pass became negated. I suspected to an extent there was some measure of law enforcement or something involved as certain bits of information about my life that were personal, though they were innocuous, seemed to keep getting circulated among my classmates. I had dismissed these earlier as mere overreaction etc.

I mean the reality is I had kept my nose clean since my crime and had worked at changing my life. That I was there at school was proof of that. I was just trying to be an ordinary person with a basic middle class 9 to 5, a mortgage, kids – the basics. Anyone that knew me knew this. I was immersed in school and outside of that my life consisted of my girlfriend, friends, my dog and spinning music at a college radio station on the weekends. Basic stuff.

Why in a graduating class of 22 people were there a significant percentage of the people there in the same capacity as Ed? If they wanted to have one or two people there monitoring me without my knowledge what did I care? I wasn't doing anything wrong, so if that's how they wanted to blow tax dollars that could have been going to actually making the public safer, that was their decision.

But Ed participated in the harassment. After he made his revelation and I scrutinized him more closely and listened to him talking to other folks in the design studio as I worked, and I could hear him actually organizing some of the harassment at times. Here was an officer of the law organizing harassment of a taxpaying hardworking innocent person and if they had spent enough time doing their homework on me as they claimed to have had, they would have known my life consisted of going to work, relationships (family, friends & girlfriends), music and (after the mid nineties) surfing the net. That was it from the time the legal matter of my teens had been resolved.

Here we were after 9-11 and the best law enforcement could do was frivolously waste tax dollars? Out of a campus where at times there could be upwards of 40,000 people they had that many people monitoring me? Moreover, all those people were involved in the harassment. I don't mean small stuff, I plans to try to get me to flunk on projects and worse. It was a daily thing and it never stopped – in fact it intensified the more semesters progressed.

Their goal was to try and get me to quit from the pressure, to flunk because my grades dropped due to a combination of the pressure and the games played (to get me to have lower grades through not giving me the full amount of information needed to fully complete a project, etc) and to be kicked out from my reacting to the pressure in the wrong way (how safe is that for the public?). I couldn't believe law enforcement was involved in this. Where in the constitution does it say law enforcement can sit around wasting tax payer dollars playing around with college students to see what will make them break psychologically and emotionally without their consent or knowledge?

Since when have we been told law enforcement now has that right? I did a crime sure, but I was punished and I cooperated with law enforcement. There are people attending that college with much more dangerous pasts than mine. The same goes for any college in the US. People make mistakes in life and then move on. But these guys were not only doing this to me, they had obviously done it to other people. I knew this because they had reassured people they were trying to convince to go along with the harassment of me on numerous occasions, that had concerns about the fairness, the legality of what they were doing, etc, that it was okay and that they had done it and/ or seen it work in the past.

Of course in my case I graduated and as a result according to their own definition of success, they failed. Ed's efforts and skill at whatever that thing was he was doing there along with the rest of them that were paid tax payer dollars to do it, failed to achieve the desired result. If anything it intensified my resolve watch them fail. My only regret is that I didn't report things sooner. Granted much of it was done subtly and in a manner so plausible deniability could have gotten them off (including the teachers passing out some of the aspects of the assignments that would be needed in order to get a complete grade to designated students that we were responsible to get it from; some of them of course including the people there like Ed or students fully on board) so people could say it wasn't their fault and keep passing the blame.

I realized some things beyond the scope of those things merely related to me. One was that these people had done this before. So what we were paying tax dollars for sometimes was going to things like this. I am an American citizen born here and raised. I'm proud of my country and anyone that knows me would know that. But how can I be proud of actions such as those that tinker with the notions of what it means to be free and what some people employed by our government can just up and decide to force others to be subjected to whether they agree or not. Remember, my choice was forfeit my scholarship and loans and leave or be harassed by my government.

If they had felt I was that unstable or a threat they could have merely denied my application to the school or portfolio submitted to the degree program. Instead they accepted me in and put in multiple law enforcement people paid by the our taxes for more than simply monitoring. They wanted me there. Whatever way things started they certainly didn't end the way they had planned or calculated. They thought it would never come out as I heard Ed reassure someone, saying I would not try to sue after graduation – he was wrong. There were numerous instances when they were completely convinced I would drop out – they were wrong. They told people I was a danger and a threat and a religious extremist all of which was lies that in the end most people completely saw through as bs.

They were constantly recalibrating the narrative because they were such inept klutzes and kept screwing up their own plans and the facts kept coming out to the contrary. In fact the more time went on the more they started looking just as the bad as the person they were falsely painting me to be.

And it was not just me that was being forced here. Other people were being forced to participate and to keep their mouths shut for fear of reprisals. Sure there were bonuses to going along like maybe better grades etc, but what was the alternative? Harassment, grades dropping and the potential of losing their parents savings, loans, grants and scholarships. We were all paying for this, and these guys were taking our money and subjecting us to what amounted to an illegal experiment.

They didn't want us to talk about it outside of class and they even tried to get me to shut up via subtle threat of my not graduating and by using the law enforcement angle to play on both fear and sympathy simultaneously, etc. They were cowardly enough to actually use the naivete of fresh out of high school students to get them to take on some of the responsibility. This implicated what were once innocent students, making them criminals, taking some of the blame off of themselves and forcing the cooperation of silence through threat of the repercussions and their actions becoming public. Remember most of them were forced into this.

But they have become public. I write about it, I have a website and social media links and have no plans to stop. Why would I? It's more American to talk about it and inform other taxpaying Americans about what their government is doing with their money than it is to stay silent and cover up the hypocrisy, falsehoods, waste and dangerous practices within the public sphere.

There may have been time during his eight years on campus when Ed was successful at whatever it was he was doing there, but one of the things proven to me in the situation I experienced was that sometimes Ed doesn't work. For those of us that have been through it or are going through harassment, whether law enforcement are involved or not, but you have some Ed-like person there involved somehow, know that it is possible to beat them and to win matter how insurmountable it feels or seems at times. I did and I have the UConn diploma to prove it! Go Huskies!! Yay!!

To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.

www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com