For the past decade, numerous students have reported racist, sexist and explicit comments coming from a Professor of Counseling at UVM to the schools Bias Response team, who investigates discrimination. He, however, has vehemently opposed UVM’s Equality Policies for years, framing them as “critical social justice”, a popular term misconstrued by the alt right to justify White Fragility . Luckily for him, UVM and the Bias Team are incompetent as their “reprimanding” has only been sitting him down with the student who’s uncomfortable, him actively ignoring their complaints, laughing it off, or saying something else problematic, ending with no resolution, effectively trapping students in his class, since it's required. He also was tenured too so that played a part. 

After not facing any consequences but feeling “stripped” of his “freedom” of saying things like “woman are the more emotional sex while men are the more logical” during his classes, along with the casual rape or self harm comments, he went to YouTube, still employed by the school with no strikes on his record, claiming UVM deliberately created “discriminatory polices against white people”. Then, national Alt Right influencers and publications picked up his videos, garnering UVM some toxic attention, causing its anti racism polices to be put into question. Because of this, a student group, UVM Sisters of Color, put up a petition for him to resign, but Aaron utilized a huge influencer, Karyln Borysenko, as a proxy (who described Aaron as a “good friend”) and had individuals send hate, harassment and physical threats this student ran group, to the point they went private and backed down from their petition, due to safety concerns. 

In the end, Aaron got away with doing exactly what UVM's policies are in place to prevent. The University didn't do anything about it. Black female students who pay money to go to this school got their lives threatened and… he's more famous… oh and he is also a practicing therapist downtown. This guy… is in charge… of people's mental health.  

Then several months later, UVM secretly paid Aaron a hefty severance to "quit on his own accord", basically making it so he was paid to be a Bigot and have student's lives threatened. Since he's also a practicing therapist downtown, he also has a bad track record with former clients and therapist peers. 

A man with a track record like this is a danger and a huge waste of time to the vulnerable people innocently seeking mental health. The fact that he has not faced any consequences for all these actions is deplorable. Please help me remove this man from his job and educate him on how wrong his white fragility mindset really is. 

- Jonny Wanzer

LINKS:

THE ORIGINAL PETITION: https://www.change.org/p/university-of-vermont-demand-the-immediate-resignation-of-uvm-asst-prof-aaron-kindsvatter

UVM SISTERS OF COLOR STATEMENT TO BACK DOWN: https://www.instagram.com/p/CMijtxIBFyN/