The Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Education is launching an investigation into George Mason University. The investigation was prompted by a complaint from professors at the school.
This investigation is based on a complaint filed with OCR by multiple professors at GMU who allege that the university illegally uses race and other immutable characteristics in university policies, including hiring and promotion. This alleged conduct creates a racially hostile environment and is prohibited under Title VI and its implementing regulation at 34 CFR § 100.3(C), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in the employment practices of educational institutions that receive federal funds. According to the complaint, GMU leadership have promoted and adopted unlawful DEI policies from 2020 through the present, which give preferential treatment to prospective and current faculty from “underrepresented groups” to advance “anti-racism.”
“Despite the leadership of George Mason University claiming that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, it appears that its hiring and promotion policies and practices from 2020 to the present, implemented under the guise of so-called ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ not only allow but champion illegal racial preferencing in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This kind of pernicious and wide-spread discrimination—packaged as ‘anti-racism’—was allowed to flourish under the Biden Administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor.
The announcement goes on to describe some of what was included in the complaint.
- The presence of “Equity Advisors in every academic department” for faculty recruiting that would take into account race, sex, and other characteristics;
- Directives from GMU President Gregory Washington that the university will “develop specific mechanisms in the promotion and tenure process” based on whether an employee is a “[person] of color” that “recognize the invisible and uncredited emotional labor that people of color expend to learn, teach, discover, and work on campus”;
- The creation of a “metric-based template for [academic] units to use” that will ensure at “the college and school level” the “vision and definition of anti-racism and inclusiveness for that unit”;
- The creation of a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence (ARIE) to make university policies which will “advance systemic and cultural anti-racism” at GMU. This includes funding “diversity cluster hire initiatives” to “reflect” its student population and eliminate “gaps” between “the demographic diversity” of its faculty and its student body; and
- Guidance from President Washington that once candidates have cleared a certain “bar” of requirements for the position, GMU would hire faculty and staff on the basis of a candidate’s “diversity…even if that candidate may not have better credentials than the other candidate.”
Gregory Washington is GMU’s first black president. His tenure began in 2020, so it certainly sounds from this list of complaints like the OCR is connecting this to him. So far there’s no direct call for his resignation but that could be coming next. That’s pretty much what happened to the president of UVA last month.
George Mason is the second major Virginia public institution to be targeted by the Trump administration in recent weeks.
Jim Ryan, the longtime president of the University of Virginia, stepped down in June after UVA was the target of a federal investigation into its DEI policies, and the Justice Department called for Ryan’s resignation.
This is the second civil rights investigation of George Mason announced this week.
On July 1, the department notified George Mason it had launched an investigation into the university’s alleged failure to address a hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty. Earlier this year, George Mason was one of 60 universities to which the department sent letters over their handling of alleged antisemitism and harassment, and the university previously faced a probe under the Biden administration.
Finally, City Journal had a great story Tuesday about how DEI bureaucrats control university hiring at some schools. This specific instance took place at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Once we’ve sorted everyone into Qualified and Unqualified groups,” Gorman wrote of the first stage in the search process, the committee would ask an administrator to “check the demographic characteristics” of the initial cut. “If it is a diverse enough group to merit moving forward with the search, fantastic!” But if the pool was deemed insufficiently diverse, the committee would revisit candidates from underrepresented groups who were initially considered unqualified, expand job advertising, or simply “cancel the search entirely.” This step would be repeated for both the shortlist and the finalist slate.
The practice raises obvious legal red flags—particularly when it involves canceling searches outright, effectively denying all candidates a fair opportunity based on immutable characteristics. Yet documents I’ve obtained show that more than a dozen universities have adopted some version of this approach.
This seems plainly illegal and other universities might be using similar methods to make race a factor in hiring and promotion. Based on the hints mentioned above, an investigation of GMU’s practices seems warranted.
