A York University professor has taken the university and six of its employees to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, alleging discrimination and harassment based on race and disability, and reprisals for speaking out against his treatment in what he describes as a four-year-long ordeal.

In two complaints filed at the tribunal, in June 2018 and in November 2019, Aimé Avolonto, an associate professor in the Department of French Studies at Glendon College, accuses York University of “creating and perpetuating the discriminatory culture and practices” and creating “a poisoned and toxic environment.” He alleges that the mistreatment he received was systemic as well as interpersonal. “To be clear,” he writes in his claim, the mistreatment “is ongoing in nature and continues to this day.”

There have been no mediations or hearings on the complaints, according to the tribunal.

“York University takes complaints of harassment and discrimination seriously,” Yanni Dagonas, acting chief spokesperson for York University told the Star in an email. “An independent external investigator has been retained to conduct a full investigation regarding the matters of which you are inquiring. York University cannot comment on the specifics of complaints that are currently under investigation.”

The university sought a deferral on the first complaint, telling the tribunal in a letter that the “allegations remain part of an ongoing full-blown investigation being conducted by a neutral third party.” The human rights tribunal denied this request in March 2019.

No responses to either complaint have been filed yet.

Avolonto has been on the York University faculty since 2004, the only Black man among the full-time faculty in his department. He was also elected chair of the department in 2014 and re-elected in 2016 for a stint that was to end in June 2020.

Instead, he says he has been on a paid leave of absence from the university for more than a year, told to vacate his position as chair, and has no teaching assignments. York confirmed he is currently on a paid leave of absence.

“I would not like to comment at the moment,” Avolonto told the Star.

Based on the documents filed at the tribunal, Avolonto’s first complaint against the university and six staff members paints a picture of a Black man in a leadership position at York University facing serious retaliation that began, he says, after the university did not handle an initial allegation against him sensitively and instead allowed the situation to escalate into a crisis that drew in more and more people.

York University’s actions, he alleges, fed rumours about him and “reinforced the negative stereotype that I was the transgressor” and also reinforced that the mostly white staff members he named in his complaint were “blameless victims” that “needed to be protected from me.”

Avolonto’s second complaint is against the university alone and focuses on the neutral third-party investigation that he says he himself had sought.

How it began

According to the complaint, it all began in May 2016, when Donald Ipperciel, then the principal of Glendon College, told Avolonto an assistant professor, Marie-Elaine Lebel, had filed a formal complaint against him.

For almost three months, Avolonto tried to find out what the allegations against him were, he says in his complaint to the tribunal.

He lists his interactions with Lebel in the months prior: One was a meeting in January 2016 that he described as “conspicuously unremarkable,” another was a text exchange about a cancelled lunch plan in February 2016. He could remember no other contact in that period, he says.

Even before he found out what the allegations were, he says, other senior staff who should not have been privy to the complaint referred to it “in an attempt to exclude” him from participating in committees he had previously been part of.

When Avolonto finally received a copy of the complaint in August 2016, he says, he found that Lebel “characterized a number of unremarkable, benign and otherwise normal interactions between her and me in a misleading manner that suggested I was a sexual predator, aggressive, threatening, intimidating and violent, and I possessed little, if any, self-control.”

He says when he went to the principal to discuss his response to the allegations, Ipperciel asked him to consider what steps he could take to modify his behaviour even before reading his response. At no point, he says, did the principal tell him he had asked the complainant to also self-reflect. “I was taken aback,” Avolonto writes in his complaint, “It was clear to me that he had pre-judged the situation.”

Ipperciel, who is now York’s chief information officer, did not respond to the Star’s email. York University’s Dagonas said the university’s statement represented the university and its senior staff, including Ipperciel and assistant principal Ian Roberge.

According to Avolonto’s complaint, York University conducted an internal investigation and in September 2016, found Lebel’s allegations against him were not substantiated.

York denied this.

“The investigation is ongoing, and no part of the investigation has been found ‘unsubstantiated’,” York’s Dagonas said. “We expect a report, containing the findings of the investigation will be submitted to York as soon as possible. York cannot comment further on matters under investigation nor on proceedings before the human rights tribunal.”

That fall in 2016, despite the rumours swirling around him, Avolonto’s colleagues at Glendon re-elected him as chair of the Department of French Studies for a three-year term.

However, almost six months later, in March 2017, Avolonto says he discovered during an open house that the principal had still implemented “remedial measures” that included physically separating him and Lebel, “rooted in the belief that she required ‘protection’ from me.”

Avolonto did not know about this, but other staff did, he says. At the open house, he writes, each academic department was to set up and staff a table in a large room for prospective students and parents to get information. Lebel, he says, “made a public request to set up her table outside of the large meeting room where everyone else was setting up.” This was accommodated, he says.

“Since the complaint I made against Prof. Avolonto is still under investigation and subject to litigation, I’m unable to comment for the moment,” Lebel told the Star via email.

Lebel has still to file a response to Avolonto’s complaint, the tribunal confirmed.

It was customary at that open house for the chair of the Department of French studies to deliver a welcome speech. But, he says, assistant principal Ian Roberge told him, “without providing me with any advance notice or any reasonable explanation,” Avolonto would not be speaking. A past chair would be delivering the speech instead.

Roberge, now the interim principal at Glendon College, did not respond to the Star’s questions.

Other complaints

According to Avolonto’s complaint to the tribunal, other tensions cropped up in that period. For instance, in January 2017, he says, Ipperciel and Roberge told him students had been complaining about him for two months, that some of them were in tears, some had “clearly experienced extreme emotional distress” because he had harassed them and there was a petition against him signed by 28 students.

But during a meeting he had with Ipperciel and Roberge with his union representative present, Avolonto says in his complaint, there was little evidence provided of these student complaints and no explanation for why York University had not intervened to protect the students given the allegations. At the time of his complaint to the tribunal in June 2018, he had still to see that petition, he says.

Hiring of a Black professor

Also in March 2017, the same month as the experiences Avolonto alleges around the open house, a routine situation around the hiring of an assistant professor turned into a debacle.

The university had a five-member hiring committee, with Avolonto the only Black person in it, he says. There were three candidates including a Black woman short-listed for the faculty position. In his complaint, Avolonto says four associate professors who were not on the committee had “openly and aggressively” attempted to dissuade the committee from hiring the Black female candidate, including by threatening to convene a review of the hiring process.

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The hiring committee ultimately found the Black woman best suited for the job and made a unanimous recommendation to the principal that she get the job, he says. The final decision was the principal’s, and Ipperciel offered it to her. Still, Avolonto says, the four professors who were not part of the committee attempted to hold Avolonto accountable for her hiring. “I was no less or more responsible for the recommendation … than any of the other four committee members.”

The assumption was that the new professor was less qualified and that Avolonto was championing her application because they were both Black, he says.

A water fountain incident

Avolonto describes another incident that same month, March 2017, when Ipperciel told him a student had complained about how he used a water fountain, he says. “The unnamed student reportedly told him that I had washed my hands in the water fountain,” he says in the complaint.

He says he was taken aback not only that a student might monitor his use of a fountain but that a principal would deem it important enough to raise it as a complaint, particularly given the history of segregated water fountains.

“He knew and ought to have known that I would feel as if my activities were being monitored and subjected to a higher level of scrutiny” than colleagues who were not Black, he says.

More consequences

By June 2017, Avolonto says in his complaint, “rumours about me having engaged in various forms of misconduct and inappropriate behaviour had become commonplace and had spread throughout Glendon College. … I felt powerless to rebut them.”

That month, a group of about 29 students “rallied to my defence,” he writes, and wrote a letter to the principal defending Avolonto.

That was also the month York University asked him to step down from his re-elected position as chair of the Department of French Studies, he says. In doing so, the university treated him differently from other department chairs and “gave credence and lent legitimacy” to staff members campaigning to remove him from his position, he says. The university thus became complicit in the harassment, discrimination and reprisal action, he alleges in the complaint.

Avolonto says he raised a number of race- and reprisal-based human rights concerns against several individuals in positions of authority.

“When I raised human rights concerns,” he says, the university “gave the benefit of the doubt to the employees I accused,” and even promoted some of them. In contrast, he says, when non-Black employees complained about him, the university “swiftly rushed to judgment without conducting an investigation,” and implemented measures that led “to the diminution of my responsibilities, authority and scope of influence.”

The third-party investigation

In his second complaint to the tribunal in November 2019, Avolonto names York University alone as the defendant and raises concerns about the conduct of the neutral third-party investigator Roger Beaudry, whom York University retained, and accuses the university of failing to accommodate Avolonto’s disability-related needs.

Avolonto’s complaint cites a letter by another professor who said she was withdrawing from the investigation because she found the process “biased.”

In the letter that is quoted from in his complaint, that other professor is cited as saying the neutral third-party investigator had a “restricted understanding of what racism is,” that he attempted “several times to summarize my testimony in a way that supported the theory that Professor Aimé Avolonto was the main source of my problems in the department,” that he showed “very little interest” in concerns she raised about the unfair treatment Avolonto received.

Beaudry told the Star he was “not at liberty to comment on any workplace investigation I am currently conducting or have conducted” citing confidentiality of neutral workplace investigation processes. “The confidentiality exists in part to protect victims of harassment and discrimination,” he said by email. He said he and his colleagues had decades of legal experience dealing with cases of harassment and discrimination and counted among their clients the Canadian and Ontario human rights commissions.

Avolonto says the investigation process left him suffering from anxiety and depression and a “dangerous rise in blood pressure,” according to a doctor’s note he reproduces in the complaint. He says despite notes from doctors that he not meet this investigator, the university asked him to undergo an independent medical examination. It did not give him the report of that exam.

He says the university did offer accommodations such as answering the questions in writing or having someone with him during the interview process but writes that the “mere thought” of an interview with the investigator “made me feel nauseated and anxious.”

Avolonto says that by the time of his complaint to the tribunal in November 2019, the university had not shown any evidence that it would experience “undue hardship” if it changed the investigator.

“The university’s complaint investigation procedures afford parties with an opportunity to provide information relevant to the complaints and comment on the draft investigation report before the final report is issued,” York’s statement to the Star said. “York will provide reasonable accommodations as necessary to allow a party to participate in an investigation.”

Avolonto urges the tribunal to find the university and the employees he names jointly responsible for violating the province’s human rights code in their treatment of him. “I have experienced intense feelings of stigmatization, embarrassment, anxiety, fear, powerlessness, humiliation and isolation,” he writes in the complaint.

He is seeking compensation for lost wages in each complaint and compensation for the violation of his human rights for $200,000 in the first complaint and $150,000 in the second complaint.