The Institute for Shock Physics is in a union dispute with the United Auto Workers student union that may escalate to arbitration over Heather Moon, an academic student employee who was forced out of ISP.

The grievance is on hold while Compliance and Civil Rights investigates. However, UAW 4591, the student-employee branch of the union, intends to escalate to arbitration, which would bring in an outside investigator to resolve their claims.

ISP has a reputation among students and faculty as a place where people are treated poorly, Moon said. However, it is one of the only ways to get into the field of shock physics.

“For many years, decades, actually, ISP has been known as a place where students suffer abuse,” Moon said. “In all of these decades, four decades, never has a non-male physics student graduated.”

Currently, every faculty member at ISP is male and the research staff is also majority male. Moon said the other male students are aware of the sexism that exists at ISP but do not want to take part in the investigation.

“They say stuff like, ‘Let me know how I can help, but I can’t be part of the investigation,’” Moon said. “I had been told by other students ‘Maybe you’ll be the first non-male to make it through.’”

The union’s goal is to make sure no other student has to go through what Moon and other students went through.

“Our goals are really to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anybody anymore. They stole everything they can from me,” Moon said. “I’m not asking for them to give it back. I’m asking them to not steal again from another student.”

Moon said they faced discrimination from their supervisor at ISP and their experiments were unnecessarily delayed. Moon worked at ISP for two and a half years, during which time they initially received small comments that escalated.

“I thought maybe they were just trying to help me out,” Moon said. “But those comments got more frequent.”

Moon also said they received delays in their research and experiment progress soon after the comments escalated.

“When I started working on my preliminary examination proposal, there were a lot of delays in my progress,” Moon said.  “Purposeful delays, it seemed toward my experiments, and then all this time I was getting excellent evaluations.”

Moon said after over two years at ISP, their advisor informed them ISP would be cutting their funding.

“They told me the reason I was no longer funded was because they were uncomfortable advising me,” Moon said.

Moon said they were also warned before becoming a part of ISP.

“When I entered ISP, I was told by many students ‘You shouldn’t work at ISP, they’re not very nice there,'” Moon said. “I was actually asked by faculty, ‘Why would you work over there?’”

Acacia Patterson, a union representative on the grievance, said a lot of students are aware of ISP’s reputation.

“We have a lot of students who are familiar with the situation in physics who said, ‘Yeah, something like this happened to me, I was told when I came here when I was a prospective student, not to go to ISP,’” Patterson said.

ISP conducted an internal investigation and said the dispute was an academic issue. Patterson said ISP did an inadequate job and did not address any issues faced by Moon.

In December 2024, members of UAW 4591 marched to the office of David Cillay and delivered a petition with over 250 signatures to his staff. The petition asked the WSU administration to take discrimination in science seriously.

“WSU is actively pushing women and nonbinary students out of STEM by refusing to acknowledge or address these issues,” Patterson said. “They have sided with abusers for a very long time, so we’re going to really push back on them to be held accountable.”

Macarena Santillan came to WSU because of the ISP program. She said she did a summer program with ISP and they welcomed her in. She was hired as a research assistant for a semester, quickly noticing some things were off about the program, she said.

“They would require you to be there from nine to five every day, in the office, no matter what,” Santillan said. “I noticed that if I got there at like 9 a.m., I would have my advisor call to my office. We had to phone in their office and at 9:02 a.m. he was calling to check that I was there, or he would just go by my office and see if I was there.”

Moon said they experienced the same thing and that their other male lab partners were not held to the same standards and were often not in the office from nine to five.

“Even though I showed up between six and seven every day, I was still reminded regularly, even though they knew I was there, that I had to be there for nine to five, but my lab mate had never been told. He had never been told that he was required to be there for nine to five and often wasn’t,” Moon said.

Eventually, Santillan was told her funding would be cut without any prior indications that she was doing poorly.

“I was making progress; they seemed to be happy with it,” Santillan said. “There was no indication that I was not doing my research correctly. So, it was just really a shock for me.”

Moon said they are unlikely to work in shock physics now.

“I think both Macarena and I are in a position where a career in shock physics is not a for-sure thing anymore, and very unlikely,” Moon said. “I work in acoustics now and likely I will find a position in acoustics.”

Moon said their experience at ISP caused a lot of stress and the experience still impacts their life now.

“I was in a position where I was terrified to fail over there and I was double-checking and making sure that no experiment ever failed,” Moon said. “And when that experiment finished, I just had to walk out of the building and just cry because I was so stressed that something might go wrong and they would get rid of me.”