Sushma Akoju (she/her/hers)

Support for SA/SV victims: Recently news has been going rounds surrounding SA and how it is treated. My tweet https://x.com/sushmanandakoju/status/2105710657807286562 is in support for those victims. Both international and domestic victims face hard roads to poor campus culture. In my experience, being a Community Educator for Consent Based Communication at the SHARPP center, UNH was unforgettable. Less popular universities such as the University of New Hampshire and the University of Arizona do better than more popular ones when it comes to SA/SV. Despite my smoke allergies and food allergies, I was attacked for mentioning the same. Most Indians may not have these allergies, but I have had these since I was a kid. Some male members exploit it, and some of their supporters who are female also engage in such. Such culture that disrespects any form of no-consent should be condemned and should be penalized.

SV. I am a victim of SV. I survived shame, hypercriticism, false claims, defamation, and more. That led me to withdraw from a PhD program. It is a perpetrator’s world, and expecting that world to recognize a victim’s intellect and brains is labelled overconfidence, arrogance, and every other negative label. When a community wants your success but not your difficult moments and fails to respect you, you simply disengage. Cultural taboos and group shaming do not come to the rescue or preserve communities that are unsupportive. In addition to this, people are heavily stereotyped, which makes it challenging. I had to undergo other screening filters — whether I am contacting victim support for money or for real SV — and people also tend to put words in my mouth. I have consistently refused any monetary or even bare-minimum financial support often given to victims, within Indian and other communities. University top management has high control over whether a victim is treated as deserving financial support, and what I saw matches processes at other universities. I was told I should show resilience by working alongside my perpetrators, or let them work on my research, so I rise to the occasion to prove that I won. This was turned into a community game by allowing those offended communities.

Brown and stereotypes. All of this occurred while I was additionally called brown and dirt, after enduring an SV and several of its consequences. The people who say brown and dirt are also the same people who love brown as a color for style and love several shades of brown lip colors and eye shadows — isn’t that dirty then? I was also attacked and verbally threatened to report to ICE by people in the perpetrators’ in-group, including people who shared just their skin color or their nationality or just religion. No matter how many times I state I am in a committed relationship, there is a repeated push that I should date a person of a specified skin color, nationality, or religion. How cacophonic is this? A simple no was not enough. People still wanted to flirt, talk dirty, create fake Twitch accounts, and call SV “hot”. Perpetrators and their in-group and out-group supporters made my life rough. Can you even imagine? I believe people don’t know the consequences of their actions and do not want to know them, because knowing would mean accountability, which they do not want. I cannot take back what I said because I also cannot undo, forget, or remove what they did and said to me. Will they confront themselves, and not attack me for speaking this?

SV victims’ voices. This was the reason I wrote this: I am not a stereotype!. Please read and support this. When you are pigeonholed, or people shut you off for requesting support by forcing words into your mouth, you need to let your truth be heard. SV victims’ voices matter — whether black, brown, pale, white, yellow, green, purple, or even male, female, other, or whether teen, adult, or older adult. Let us respect the voices and give the comfort of being heard and supported. Don’t take Title IX seriously. It is an unstable policy that undergoes and gets influenced by other policies more frequently than day and night. Ignore it. Rely on police, victim advocates, and therapists.

We need a #shutup movement for all those who so easily call "it" a lie.

Because there are many Harry Potters, Hermione Grangers, Kataras, airbenders, and so on, we need advocacy for consent-based communication as the central part of all educational and academic environments, not just for women but also men.

We are all Jane Doe. We stand with her and every Jane Doe out there.

If you are considering requesting recommendations from individuals connected to the University of Arizona or the University of New Hampshire, please note the following: Legal victim advocates have advised me that both the perpetrators and their supporters in those matters are adversaries. As a result, they are unlikely to provide recommendations that would support PhD admissions or job opportunities.

For this reason, I request that anyone evaluating me for PhD programs or employment opportunities not expect me to supply or request letters of recommendation from the University of Arizona or the University of New Hampshire. Due to the presence of perpetrators and their supporters, those individuals may feel conflicted about supporting my applications.

I am glad to provide other forms of verification of my work, skills, and academic record directly and any evaluation of skills through formal interviews/conversations.

Research works developed as my own ideas that were systematically rejected under Neurosymbolic AI: I am now choosing to work only on the theoretical aspects of some of my research ideas moving forward, given that I was denied computational resources as well as academic access to AI tools available to other PhD students in the respective cohorts. This is an attempt to draw a boundary and prevent any further coercion to reconcile with perpetrators, with the expectation that it will finally be respected after 4+ years of retaliation.

Thank you for asking how the case closed. The parties jointly requested dismissal. I have no further comment on the terms.

The case was filed to protect and preserve dignity, not for monetary profit. I confirm that no payment or settlement amount was received. Dignity is invaluable. That is what I aimed for, and that is what I received. I litigated it pro se.

Special thanks to state and U.S. Senate offices on the East Coast and the West Coast.

At the same time I dealt with someone else falsely claiming ownership of my work, and with online harassment and deepfakes from people covered by court-agreed no-contact directives. For safety, and consistent with government guidance, I have refused to work with people who work with those individuals. It is now their responsibility, and their supporters’ responsibility, to keep that no-contact. I have not worked with them and will not. These were also the people who went further: food with nuts after I had stated a nut allergy; smoke held near me, my dorm, or my apartment after I had stated smoke allergies; false claims; and pressure to date someone they preferred, so their story would look true. It should not be surprising that this came from some Indian and other international students, not from elsewhere.

I litigated this matter as a pro se plaintiff and negotiated it myself, with no legal support. The court denied appointed counsel three times, and no external legal aid came through after several efforts. After the stipulation of dismissal, several remaining motions were denied as moot. I also asked that confidential information disclosed in the case be redacted or protected. That request was denied.

What I learned from February 2026 forward: you are enough to fight and stand up for yourself. Indian community that will circulate a photo will not always show up in actual hardship and despite repeated outreach, I was left with no support from Indian community. American support systems did show up. I do not believe most Americans hate Indian women. A smaller subset thinks differently from that broader, reasonable support. The path is consistent with many other American women who are tough, resilient and face extreme hardship.

I have formally withdrawn from the University of New Hampshire Ph.D. program because approved accommodations for a hand injury were not in place for Computer Science coursework. For recovery from that injury, with support from people at UNH who stood by me, and because of false claims that followed from people I refused to date, I have chosen not to take programming-intensive roles such as research engineer, programmer, or DevOps. My work is in theory of computation, representational geometry, and AI research. Thanks to all who supported me at UNH despite the case.

I applied to many top universities on the East Coast. It is possible that some East Coast programs struggle to make room for a female who is both conventionally visible and intellectually serious, during this win-win situation, there are eight important revelations and lessons:

1. Even when there is an opportunity to do the right thing, people seldom do, same holds for justice too.
2. Dignity is treated differently for female of color and female of other colors. My more recent research is focused color based bias and I argue that given any color, bias exists, which contradicts the color-based bias - which I am working with some members (and I did not consent to anyone working on this or other ongoing research ideas independently without my collaboration under allowed-contact directives).
3. Every step along the way, I felt I was at the risk of sounding presumptuous, out of fear of sounding overconfident or out of fear of being ostracized or a social taboo even in 2026 for simply standing up for myself. Because the world is run by men, female are just "weak". Actually I like that idea, how about women come together just have "cuppa tea" and read lady whistledown and do some AI research casually ?
4. The common labels are like sauces in the grocery store aisle that look nice, taste good and just expire to get thrown or just run out after a while. The root cause is the need to have intellectual domination and that ugly feeling we shove it under those labels called as “envy".
5. Most people could not believe that I have a mind of my own and that I was capable of standing up for myself.
6. Some people always pretend to be supporting but always want you to be destroyed and when that does not happen, they are left with just trying to put words in your mouth/badmouthing and funniest part if people, in 2026, still fall for it - like its karma, maybe it is!
7. Draw in Chess is completely win-win situation and is in fact most challenging and difficult under extreme competitive Chess, even when you have the good opportunity to win and succeeed, but still you choose to draw. I wonder sometimes, suppose we had Reinforcement Learning that rewarded Draws, instead of Wins, how would the Chess be ? What board states would be the "best" board states? Interesting, mathematically. I argue this is fully solvable with Agentic AI for Draw.

As of February 2026, I am no longer affiliated with the University of New Hampshire. My research remains my own intellectual property. I am focused on collaborative and independent work in representational geometry in brain and AI representations, Theory of Computation, Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience. I am open to collaboration consistent with professional boundaries.