Suspending professor in ‘slave labor’ case a start, but will UMKC fully investigate?

First, the better news: The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s new chancellor, Mauli Agrawal, suspended Professor Ashim Mitra with pay on Tuesday. He took this necessary action in response to allegations published in The Star that the professor for years coerced graduate students from India into a situation that one described as “nothing more than modern slavery.”

The not-good news is that Agrawal, who has been in his job since June, does not seem particularly determined to find out how this could have happened, and that’s the only way to make sure no such abuse happens from now on.

How Mitra was allowed to keep teaching in the School of Pharmacy during a previously undisclosed internal investigation during the last year does not square with Agrawal’s statements about his commitment to keeping students safe, either.

Agrawal, who announced Mitra’s suspension during an interview with The Star’s editorial board, seems like a good guy and an otherwise impressive hire for the university. Before coming here, he was interim provost at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

But his ability to achieve his ambitious vision of expanding and improving UMKC will depend on well how he handles this serious lapse.

“I’m not so sure we’ll go back and investigate this particular case” and find out how an initial investigation went nowhere, Agrawal said. “For one, it’s over a long time period some of these things are coming out; these people are not even here.”

Thanks to the telephone and the internet, that isn’t a problem. Some of the students who are “not even here” were quoted by name in The Star.

“My concern is going forward,” the new chancellor said, “that we build a system that’s fair.”

But doesn’t that entail going back and seeing who dropped the ball and how?

“No, it becomes a long time ago. We don’t know exactly what happened,” he said. “I think it’s talking to the students of today and showing that they’re comfortable rather than going back and digging 15, 20 years ago. And we’re not set up for that kind of investigation. We’re an educational institution focused on the students we have with us and how to make them successful.”

Asked again if he’d try to learn where and how the system failed, Agrawal said, “I’m going to examine the process going forward, if the process is correct and if there is any crack in the process to be fixed.”

Which will be impossible without a full investigation of what did and did not happen in the past.

And during the investigation that went on, not in the mists of time but this past year, was anything done to protect students from further harm?

“It’s being done today,” the chancellor said, “because you have to get to a point where you have enough evidence that you can see, even though the investigation is not complete.”

The Star investigation found that during Mitra’s 24 years at UMKC, he convinced students that if they did not act as his personal servants, they could lose their student visas. Former colleagues told The Star they saw what was going on and tried to stop him.

Mridul Mukherji, also a pharmacy school professor from India, is suing Mitra and the school, alleging that he was harassed and discriminated against after he filed a formal complaint about Mitra’s behavior in 2014.

According to the suit, complaints were overlooked because Mitra brought in so many research dollars. That “does not matter,” Agrawal assured us, and will have no bearing on what happens now, or in the future.

But to make sure of that, and to move forward at all, Agrawal is going to have to start by going back.