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Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright claimed that Cornell University racially discriminated against him during the hiring process for a tenure-track position at the university in 2020, and has since filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Wright, who is White and a self-proclaimed liberal, published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday detailing his fight to hold Cornell responsible for its allegedly discriminatory hiring practices which he says have prevented him, and other qualified scientists, from being considered for positions at the university.
“This isn’t a political stunt or publicity grab. It’s a last resort in response to a gross injustice that destroyed the career I spent more than a decade building. It’s about holding accountable a powerful institution that violated the law, abandoned its principles, and discriminated against me because of my race,” Wright stated.
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In 2020, Wright applied for a tenure-track position in the university’s Neurobiology and Behavior department. Unknown to him at the time, Cornell had initiated a separate search for a faculty member in evolutionary biology — his exact field of study — but kept the hiring process under wraps.
The America First Policy Institute released internal emails from Cornell last month which revealed the university’s efforts to recruit what the hiring committee referred to as a “diversity hire.”
One member of the committee candidly described the hiring process: “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,” Wright claimed.
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According to the disaffected evolutionary biologist, Cornell’s discriminatory hiring practices were conducted in coordination with the university’s Office of the Provost, which, at the time, was by current Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff. Wright claimed that these practices violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination by race.
He alleged that alongside their discriminatory hiring operations, Cornell orchestrated other “racially filtered” hiring pipelines, including a $16 million National Institutes of Health-funded program called the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program. The initiative’s stated goal is to enhance “compositional diversity” by requiring faculty members to revise applicant pools repeatedly until they are deemed diverse enough.
“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,” Wright proposed. “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.”
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In response to a WSJ editor’s inquiry, Cornell provided the editor with a link to a previously issued statement from June 27, claiming, “Cornell strictly prohibits unlawful bias or discrimination.” The statement was issued in response to a previous, informal complaint filed by the America First Policy Institute to several federal agencies.
In the statement, Cornell said the university “strongly disputes the allegations” made in the June complaint. Cornell also declined to comment on Wright’s formal EEOC complaint.
In closing, the evolutionary biologist called on the Trump administration to consider his case as evidence that the racially discriminatory hiring practices at universities run much deeper than they may expect, and to take this into account when prosecuting them for civil rights violations.
“Race-based hiring practices have harmed countless qualified scholars and demand serious scrutiny,” Wright concluded. “Let my case serve as a warning that there is a price for violating civil rights.”
When asked for comment, a representative for Cornell referred Fox News Digital to the previously mentioned statement from June 27.
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