Universities Sued Over Racial Discrimination in Hiring
Cornell and George Mason have allegedly violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
By George Leef
October 08, 2025
So strong is the desire for “diversity” (at least racial diversity) in higher education that school and college officials often turn a blind eye to the law against racial discrimination in employment. The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids racial discrimination in employment. It does not read that racial discrimination is illegal unless you think you have a good reason for doing so. Unfortunately, education leaders often act as if it does, engaging in blatant discrimination against candidates who don’t have the desired ancestry.
A complaint recently filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Cornell University shows how audacious its leaders were in ignoring the law.
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist. He had long desired to pursue a career in science, earning his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara followed by a postdoctoral position at Penn State. Wright won a competitive National Science Foundation fellowship and published many papers in peer-reviewed journals. One would think that he’d be an excellent candidate for a tenure-track position at any leading university. In 2019 and 2020, he applied to numerous universities with faculty openings. Among them was Cornell University, for a position in its neurobiology and behavior department—but Wright was not considered for it.
Education leaders often engage in blatant discrimination against candidates who don’t have the desired ancestry.
Several years later, he found out why.
Cornell wanted to hire a biologist but was looking only for black candidates. Since Wright is not black, he had no chance. Cornell officials wanted to keep their racially restrictive search a secret.
Fortunately, the truth eventually came to light when a whistleblower leaked several internal emails showing that the department had engaged in a “diversity hire,” meaning that only black candidates would be invited to apply. Here is what one member of the hiring committee wrote: “What we should be doing is inviting one person whom we have identified as being somebody that we would like to join our department and not have that person [be] in competition with others.” (It’s fortunate that someone who knew about Cornell’s racial discrimination leaked the emails, but, of course, that individual has to keep his or her identity a secret for fear of retribution by the university.)
From the emails, we know that, in December 2020, the assistant dean for diversity and inclusion told the faculty to “do something a little out of the ordinary” by conducting a search that would be racially restrictive. That certainly is out of the ordinary, since it has long been standard practice (and legally obligatory since the Civil Rights Act of 1964) to advertise faculty openings to all and consider applicants on the basis of individual merit, not race.
In his July 30 Wall Street Journal article, Wright observed that the discriminatory search that ruled him out on the basis of race was not unique:
In addition to orchestrating the discriminatory hiring scheme, Cornell created other racially filtered hiring pipelines, including a $16 million National Institutes of Health-funded initiative called the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First. This program, the stated purpose of which is “enhancing compositional diversity,” required hiring committees to revise applicant lists repeatedly until they were diverse enough.
What a nice euphemism—compositional diversity. That is a pleasant way of concealing the truth that the university’s policy is intended to keep out individuals who are of the wrong race.
Cornell, of course, is not the only university that has been elevating race over individual merit in faculty hiring. In her 2018 book The Diversity Delusion (which I reviewed here), Heather Mac Donald showed how pervasive the notion that student bodies and faculties must be made “diverse,” so that all groups are proportionally represented, has become. She pointed out that the absurd diversity mania is “dividing society, reducing learning, and creating an oppositional mindset that prevents individuals from seizing the opportunities available to them.”
That is precisely what Cornell did to Colin Wright and all the other scholars who were prevented from knowing about and competing for faculty openings that were closed to people who were not of the desired race.
“Compositional diversity” is a pleasant way of concealing the university’s policy of keeping out individuals who are of the wrong race.
Another university that is now facing legal trouble for its racially discriminatory hiring practices is George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. As we read in this August 25 Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Education Department announced a finding that under President Gregory Washington’s leadership, the Virginia public college violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act by ‘illegally using race and other immutable characteristics in university practices and policies, including hiring and promotion.’”
Officials thought it was more important to “diversify” the department and figured they could get away with it.
Cornell therefore is not alone in now facing legal trouble for having decided to engage in “diversity hiring” rather than evaluating everyone on his or her objective merits.
Rather than admitting its racial discrimination, Cornell released a statement declaring that it “strictly prohibits unlawful bias or discrimination” and that it “maintains an office that investigates and addresses any claims of bias or discrimination.” That sounds good, but the emails make clear that the neurobiology and behavior department did not let that office know what it was doing. Moreover, Wright’s case is far better handled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission than by a Cornell office that would have a strong incentive to sweep the matter under the rug.
In its statement, Cornell also tries to depict this case as just a minor error, declaring, “In thousands of hiring decisions in hundreds of departments and units, misunderstandings of policies can occur.”
Nice try, but it’s evident that the officials behind the decision to restrict the search only to black candidates were not operating under any “misunderstanding” about university policy or federal law. They thought it was more important to “diversify” the department and figured that they could get away with it. Like so many other colleges and universities that have engaged in illegal behavior, such as the cases I discussed here, Cornell seems inclined to spend a lot of money on legal bills rather than owning up to its racial bias.
What a refreshing change to have two different federal agencies finally targeting racial discrimination in university hiring and promotion. At least for now, we have turned the clock back to the 1960s, when the goal of equal opportunity for all was taken seriously. The Cornell and GMU cases should send chills up the spines of many college and university officials who thought that they could get away with discriminatory hiring because they did it for “good” reasons. The one and only criterion for making faculty decisions should be individual merit, and a person’s race has nothing to do with that.
George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
