A jazz musician Steve Kirby was arrested by police in May for sexual assault of a young student. Kirby retired from the University of Manitoba the next month.
Police states Kirby was arrested on allegations from a 19-year-old student on a sexual misconduct and assault. As per her statement, the victim was assaulted multiple times from September 2014 to January 2017.
Around the same period of time, almost a dozen of other students raised their concerns on a count of professor’s behavior and filed multiple official statements and complaints to the school board that was noted and filed. But for some unknown reason, no actions were taken by University to investigate and address this issue. Many former students are speaking now, remembering the situation a few years back, it was pretty common at a time, everybody was aware of Kirby`s predator-like behavior, no actions to stop it or even to communicate with a professor from the board of University.
Even though Kirby was arrested and trial took place, he had seven hearing and court dates, he was released on bail, which required him to surrender his passport while investigation and trail continue to live at his Winnipeg home.
The University of Manitoba Students Union is also concerned about the way school treated the reports and the whole situation, the union is demanding answers and responsible to be pointed out. At the same time, the University of Manitoba announced they are reviewing other professors and five investigations are open and ongoing with similar accusations, like sexual assault and harassment.
This raises a lot of question for the board and Human Recourses department, how people with such behavior, that some of them even had a history of similar allegations in the past, are getting hired to a position where they communicate with young vulnerable students and using their title continue such sexual harassment crimes. And even after being reported multiple times, still no consequences, just reports piling up?
A former student even decided to protest University`s way of handling the allegations and the whole situation with Kirby by returning his degree. Last year Daniel Jordan sent his degree back to school and demanded answers about the reason of such failure to take action, also wants to know if University is being investigated for such neglect and not taking the reports seriously at the time.