A new lawsuit might expose the extent to which Cornell University engaged in racist hiring practices amid the ongoing debate over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices.
In a post on his blog, “Reality’s Last Stand,” evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright detailed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint against the school, accusing it of discriminating against white people.
Wright alleges that the university hired a “diversity hire” for a faculty position in his field. He says the position was not posted for public view because the university wanted to hire a particular type of individual. “Cornell set up a hidden hiring process to secure a predetermined ‘diversity hire,’ violating federal law under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
In the post, Wright included screenshots of emails between university officials. One stated, “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 in competition with others.”
Wright includes documentation in his piece including emails between December 2020 and December 2022 that reveal a pattern of secrecy and racially-biased hiring practices. One official in an email highlighted the need to “do something a little out of the ordinary” to hire a particular candidate who fit the schools’ diverstiy objectives. Faculty members were encouraged to keep the practices confidential.
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In another email, officials discussed rejecting applicants based only on their DEI statements. One suggested they “dropped just one candidate from further consideration because their D&I statement was so seriously an unambiguously weak.”
Wright pointed out that these practices violated Cornell’s policy mandating that “Each opening…must be posted on the Working at Cornell website for at least five business days.”
However, the school did not do this because they were focused on hiring nonwhite people, according to Wright, who alleged that the school’s “covert and discriminatory employment practices directly impeded my access to a narrow and highly competitive job market.”
Wright initially announced that he filed the complaint in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. He slammed university President Michael Kotlikoff, who was serving as provost during the hiring proccess. Despite his public statement that the university does not “exclude anyone…for reasons irrelevant to merit.”
A spokesperson for the school denied the allegations in a statement to The Journal. They claimed the university “strictly prohibits unlawful bias or discrimination” and “strongly disputes the allegations.”
It’s not going to be easy for Cornell to defend itself against Wright’s allegations. The screenshots he includes in his blog post appear pretty damning. It seems obvious that the school was excluding white candidates in favor of those that would allow it to meet its DEI objectives.
Cornell is a private institution, but it inlcudes publicly funded colleges in its system. If the complaint is accurate, it means the school has also run afoul of President Donald Trump’s executive order barring federal funding for schools that engage in DEI practices. If the school wants to avoid federal scrutiny, it might do well to figure out what actually happened and rectify the situation as soon as possible.
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