Biologist Sues Cornell Claiming Racial Discrimination

Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist who now works for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. This week he filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Cornell University. Wright, who is white, claims he was discriminated against in a hiring process which was focused on making a “diversity hire.” In fact, he didn’t know at the time that the job was even available because it was never posted publicly.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal district court in New York, claims the university violated federal law when it sought to fill a faculty position several years ago. It cites emails from the ecology and evolutionary biology department in December 2020 that allegedly said that to make a “diversity hire” the department would invite candidates from a list of “underrepresented minority scholars” and avoid having the candidate compete with others.

Colin Wright, the plaintiff, was a postdoctoral researcher in that field at Pennsylvania State University at the time. He said he was seeking an academic job and was well qualified for the tenure-track position that Cornell allegedly filled without ever posting the job publicly, as was required by university policy.

Attorneys for the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a conservative think tank with close ties to the Trump administration that brought the case, contend that internal documents classified a list of candidates by race, ethnicity, disability status and sexual orientation. Emails allegedly indicated that the department intentionally avoided a competitive search and planned to approach candidates one at a time until one accepted.

Again, Wright didn’t know about this job at the time but he was applying for similar jobs at other schools. He found out about the hidden hiring at Cornell last year and wound up writing about it in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

I applied to countless tenure-track positions across the country in 2019 and 2020. One of those applications went to Cornell, for a position in their Neurobiology and Behavior department. Unknown to me, a few months later Cornell initiated a separate search for a faculty member in evolutionary biology—my exact field—but kept it confidential. Internal emails now show this was no accident.

Last month, the America First Policy Institute released internal Cornell emails showing the university conducted an effort to recruit what the search committee referred to as a “diversity hire.” One committee member described the process bluntly: “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.” That “somebody,” who is black, was selected not because of research excellence, but because of race. I was denied the chance to compete—so were other academics who might have been qualified…

Imagine if the races were reversed. Suppose a whistleblower uncovered internal emails showing that a university had run a secret search to ensure that qualified black applicants were excluded from consideration. Suppose the school selected only white candidates to produce a racially predetermined outcome. There would—rightfully—be national outrage. It would be a landmark civil-rights case. That’s exactly what Cornell did—except I’m white.

Ultimately, the focus on DEI led Wright to reconsider his career goals, even though he’d completed his doctorate.

I left academia in 2020 because I realized that no publication, no study, no breakthrough—nothing I could contribute—would open the doors that should have opened. That realization was maddening. Not because I lacked merit, but because of insidious racial discrimination. Across academia, qualified scholars were sidelined, forced to submit DEI statements that functioned as ideological loyalty oaths and racial litmus tests.

This should be seen as a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which prohibits racial discrimination in hiring. The question is whether affirmative action would be legal in this case. The Supreme Court has addressed affirmative action in college admissions but not in hiring.

In 2023, the Supreme Court stirred up the issue of affirmative action when it ruled that race-conscious college admissions amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. That decision, in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and a related case against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did not address hiring.

Still many experts see the decision as signaling that the justices would be inclined to rule against any racial considerations in hiring if and when such a case comes before the court.

Leigh Ann O’Neill, AFPI chief legal affairs officer, noted that in the Harvard case, the court said racial discrimination in admissions was not justified even to correct historical wrongs and that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

“In this case, we’re asking the court to uphold that same principle when making hiring decisions,” she said.

So this could be an important case, especially if it winds up being appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.

Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Hot Air’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.

Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.