José Moreno, an American studies and CLS doctoral student, said graduate students who support CLS Director Sheila Contreras’ removal face harassment, including threats to cut teaching assistant funding, from program officials. He said it can be difficult to separate the ongoing battles from his everyday life.

Contreras has been at the center of the CLS debate since last spring, when a group of students went to College of Social Science Dean Marietta Baba with complaints about how Contreras treated students. Contreras denies claims she and other administrators disrespected or harassed students.

“I would be interested to see the evidence (of harassment),” Contreras said. “I see the program making a lot of progress. We are moving forward in so many ways and I would prefer to focus on that.”

Moreno and about 15 CLS graduate and undergraduate students met with MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon and other university officials Wednesday to ask for Contreras’ removal and a dismantling of the new CLS Faculty Policy Advisory Committee during a closed-door meeting. The advisory committee was created by Baba this year to provide guidance to Contreras.

“Sometimes, emotionally, it has been draining because I have to think about this stuff,” Moreno said. “You’re focused on this struggle, trying to do your teaching and trying to do your work. You feel the pressure at night when you’re sleeping.”

Simon spoke with students for almost an hour after the scheduled one-hour meeting ended.

MSU will continue to work toward finding a resolution everyone in CLS can support, Simon said.

“It’s important that students who are part of the program believe they have been well educated,” Simon said. “There are obviously a lot of issues and different perspectives on those issues. We’re going to try to sort those out in the best interest of the collective.”

But Moreno said the situation is worsening each day without administrative action.

“If we continue this process, it’s going to get worse,” Moreno said. “We need to come to some type of resolutions to resolve this issue. If the administration wants to keep her as director, she has to give us something.”

Felix Medina, a CLS doctoral student, said the administration’s lack of action continues to frustrate CLS students.

“We just want everything to go back to the way it was and (Simon) kept giving us the administrative run around, telling us that there was policy and procedure,” Medina said. “We’re just letting her know that we followed it once and she needs to step in and do something about it.”

Sara Vitale, a social relations and policy senior, said she felt betrayed by Simon’s responses during the meeting.

“What we got out of this meeting was another rubber stamp from the administration for Dr. Contreras, Rubén Martinez and all these other people put in charge of our program … to continue their corruption and harassment of students and basically the destruction of our program,” Vitale said. “(Simon) made it very clear the action she was going to take is nothing.”