Immediately after taking office in July 2020, George Mason University president Gregory Washington announced a flurry of race-conscious initiatives aimed at changing the way the school hired, promoted, and paid faculty members. They included plans to “recognize the invisible and uncredited emotional labor that people of color expend” during the school’s tenure process and to launch “diversity cluster hire initiatives,” all in the name of making George Mason “a national exemplar of anti-racism and inclusive excellence in action.”
Washington was met with some internal pushback from faculty members, several of whom asked him to explain how the targeted hiring of minorities complied with federal anti-discrimination law. In response, Washington penned an April 2021 message titled, “Adopting an Inclusive Excellence Framework for Hiring Will Deliver Best Candidates.” It lamented that “just 30 percent of our faculty are from ethnic minority, multi-ethnic, or international communities” and defended hiring practices that would increase that figure—even if they meant hiring a less qualified candidate.
“Professional experience will always be vital in recruiting our workforce, but so must lived experiences,” Washington wrote. “If you have two candidates who are both ‘above the bar’ in terms of requirements for a position, but one adds to your diversity and the other does not, then why couldn’t that candidate be better, even if that candidate may not have better credentials than the other candidate?”
George Mason went on to adopt the initiatives and maintain them for years, according to materials obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The College of Humanities and Social Sciences’s 2021–2024 “Excellence Plan,” for example, said its goal was to “serve as an exemplar of inclusive excellence” and “diversify the composition of the faculty and staff.”
Then Donald Trump returned to the White House and began targeting the sort of race-conscious policies Washington championed. He began changing his tune.
In a March campus-wide email, Washington swore that his school had never made decisions based on race and had “always operated with a commitment to equality under the law.” He nonetheless said George Mason would edit or even remove some DEI-related webpages because they were “misleading or outdated.”
The Trump administration was not convinced. On July 10, the Department of Education announced that it had launched a Title VI investigation into George Mason based on a complaint filed by professors who contended “that the university illegally uses race and other immutable characteristics in university policies, including hiring and promotion.” The Department of Justice opened its own probe a week later.
Washington has responded by denying wrongdoing and blaming external actors, including the Free Beacon, for working to “paint the institution in a negative light” in an effort to oust him. Inside George Mason, however, some faculty members believe Washington’s diversity policies ran afoul of federal law.
“President Washington said in emails and meetings that he was making George Mason a leading anti-racism university in the country,” one faculty member told the Free Beacon. “These weren’t just words. There was pressure from Washington’s administration and actual policies from his anti-racism task force.”
“To be honest, I and many other professors I know felt powerless and even silenced about raising our concerns of what sounded like illegal acts to us,” the faculty member added.
Center for Equal Opportunity general counsel Shawna Bray agreed, telling the Free Beacon that Washington’s initiatives appeared “designed to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity.”
“It seems almost impossible for an institution to comply with Title VI in hiring decisions,” she said, “when a university’s leadership directs the institution to implement impermissible policies like taking into consideration emotional labor done by people of color (which definitionally only people from that favored group can be credited with doing) or when people making hiring decisions are told to prioritize diversity over merit.”
In his March email defending his policies, Washington said George Mason wasn’t using “proxies or other indirect means to substitute for race in decision-making.” He may have a point: His policies in many cases were more explicit.
As part of Washington’s hiring plan, the George Mason president appointed so-called equity advisers to every department who were tasked with participating “in faculty recruiting by approving search committee short lists,” according to a July 23, 2020, message from Washington.
Those equity advisers became enforcers of race-based policies. A senior associate dean told a faculty member in a fall 2021 email reviewed by the Free Beacon that a hiring search panel they were forming needed to be “a diverse committee, male & female and some racial or ethnic diversity” and provided recommendations. The final search committee was made up of two white women and an Asian-American man. Their races and genders were listed on the public job posting.
Hiring authorities were also required to ask diversity-related questions. The Free Beacon obtained a university-provided list of examples, which included, “As a higher education professional, what specific things have you done to promote diversity in the community?” and “Please discuss how your record of achievements in your career has been enhanced by exposure to diverse people, places, experiences or publications.”
The College of Humanities and Social Sciences similarly issued an “inclusive faculty search plan,” which required “inclusive language” in job descriptions and hiring committees to collect data on the “demographic composition of the national (or international) pool of candidates in the discipline of the open position.”
After Trump took office, Washington announced that he was changing the name of George Mason’s Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to the Office of Access, Compliance, and Community. Among the webpages the university deleted was the site for his anti-racism task force and another dedicated to Black Lives Matter, which directed students to support a dozen left-wing organizations. One was the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund that busts violent criminals from jail, archived links show.
George Mason directed the Free Beacon’s request for comment to an outside law firm handling the federal investigations. It did not respond to a request for comment.
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