The University of Colorado has reached a settlement agreement with two doctoral students from India who sued the university after reporting discrimination and retaliation, which they claimed prevented them from earning their degrees.

Adi Prakash and Urmi Bhattacheryya were international students studying to earn their doctoral degrees in cultural anthropology when they reported racial and ethnic microaggressions by department staff in the fall of 2023.

After they reported the discrimination, the department continued to retaliate against them in the years that followed, the students said. The two students filed the lawsuit in September.

“The university reached an agreement with the plaintiffs and denies any liability,” CU Boulder spokesperson Deborah Mendez-Wilson said in a statement. “The university has established processes to address allegations of discrimination and harassment, and it adhered to those processes in this matter. CU Boulder remains committed to fostering an inclusive environment for students, faculty and staff.”

CU has agreed to pay the students $200,000 and grant them master’s degrees, Prakash said, and in return, the students have withdrawn their complaints and can never apply to be students or employees at CU. The university did not confirm the details of the settlement agreement.

“It offers a vindication of what we were saying for two years, what we went through,” Bhattacheryya said. “It was extremely traumatic and arduous.”The matter began on Sept. 5, 2023, when Prakash was heating his lunch in a shared microwave and staff members made racist comments about the smell of his Indian food, he said. After attempting to communicate why the comments were not OK, Prakash said, the situation escalated to the point where he was banned from heating food in that microwave, stopped attending classes in person and Bhattacheryya, his partner and now fiancée, lost her paid teaching assistant position.

Acts of retaliation in the two years that followed include mass resignations of the students’ advisory committees without warning or explanation, reassignment to advisers outside their subdisciplines who provided inadequate mentorship, denial of promised transfer credit, poor performance feedback, downgrading of their student status and revocation of their doctoral funding, the students reported.

Now, the former students are back in India. At this point, they said they’re recovering and figuring out what’s next. They don’t foresee ever finishing their doctoral degrees, which was the reason they enrolled at CU Boulder in the first place.

“I feel very disappointed in the (education) system because of the way we saw it play out,” Prakash said.

Bhattacheryya felt the university treated them as if they were dispensable and would not push back. In the current political climate, she said, it’s especially important for people of color and international students to stand up for themselves.

“We both feel like this is something that’s very important to set a precedent,” Bhattacheryya said.