In recent months, Ivy League universities have changed their tune on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.†Under pressure from President Trump, these institutions have renamed DEI departments, scuttled unpopular programs, and assured the administration that they are following the law. As Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff explained in February: “Just as we do not exclude anyone at Cornell for reasons irrelevant to merit, neither do we . . . hire or promote employees, award chairs or tenure, or make any other merit-driven decisions at Cornell based on race, ethnicity, or other attributes.â€
Kotlikoff’s statement was unequivocal, but according to a trove of internal documents we have obtained, it was also untrue. In fact, whistleblowers at Cornell describe a system of intentional discrimination in faculty hiring that rewards and punishes individuals according to their ancestry, rather than their ability.
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A Cornell whistleblower pointed to two problematic features of the university’s hiring system. The first was its
use of “diversity statements,†which allow applicants to express their commitment to left-wing racial ideology. In December 2022, a Cornell professor in one of the scientific departments wrote an email to colleagues explaining that the hiring committee would pre-filter applicants solely based on diversity statements.
“As pre-planned as a best practice, we first did a pre-screening of just the [DEI] statements submitted by the candidates; all were read by two committee members, and any that were flagged as highly suboptimal were also reviewed by a third committee member with high DEI expertise,†the email reads. “In the end, we dropped just one candidate from further consideration because their [DEI] statement was so seriously and unambiguously weak that we could not imagine them being a finalist. That same process led us to identify a few others who also had weak [DEI] statements.â€
The email makes clear that DEI statements were used to reject candidates who were insufficiently committed to “diversity.†{snip}
The second feature was the university’s pursuit of “diversity hires.†According to an email we obtained, a Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology hiring committee conducted a search process in 2020 without public notice. Then, according to the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit research center with a litigation wing that is preparing a legal complaint against Cornell’s hiring practices, the committee generated a list of candidates made up entirely of racial minorities. Finally, the email suggests, the committee reached out one by one, with the explicit goal of selecting a “diversity hire.â€
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