Cornell University Discriminated Against Me

Prof Wright is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who undoubtedly with his employer set up Cornell. And was right to do so.

F-ck Cornell. They deserve to be slammed. Reverse racism is racism in my book.

Just because I'm a white, communist who practices Islam, Buddism and Hare Krishna is no excuse for my application to the NY Times Sports Dept being overlooked. I'm the next Howard Cosell.

Cornell University Discriminated Against Me

I was excluded from a candidate search on the basis of my race and have filed an EEOC complaint.

By Colin Wright, WSJ

July 30, 2025 4:53 pm ET

I’m filing a complaint against Cornell University for racial discrimination.

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.

I’m an evolutionary biologist, a liberal and a first-generation college graduate. I dreamed of becoming a scientist for as long as I can remember. I pursued that passion for more than 12 years—earning a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara and completing a postdoctoral position at Pennsylvania State University. Along the way, I was awarded a competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and published nearly 30 peer-reviewed papers in leading academic journals. For my career stage, I was among the top in my field.

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.

This discriminatory practice, conducted in coordination with Cornell’s Office of the Provost—led at the time by current Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff—violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race. That’s why, with representation from the America First Policy Institute, I’m taking legal action against Cornell.

What makes this worse is the university’s continued dishonesty. This year, Mr. Kotlikoff wrote: “We do not exclude anyone at Cornell for reasons irrelevant to merit, neither do we admit or evaluate students, hire or promote employees, award chairs or tenure, or make any other merit-driven decisions at Cornell based on race, ethnicity, or other attributes not relevant to merit.” The leaked documents show otherwise.

In addition to orchestrating the discriminatory hiring scheme, Cornell created other racially filtered hiring pipelines, including a $16 million National Institutes of Health-funded initiative called the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program. or First. This program, the stated purpose of which is “enhancing compositional diversity,” required hiring committees to revise applicant lists repeatedly until they were diverse enough. If the applicant pool wasn’t diverse enough, the process was paused for “additional robust outreach.”

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.

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.

Discriminatory DEI policies represent a systemic rot that has weakened the public’s trust in science and demoralized a generation of scholars. After leaving academia, I spent a year at the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism fighting the ideology that pushed me out, and I’ve spent the past five years using my voice and platform to defend the principle of colorblind merit, under which success is determined by skill and hard work, not skin color. Now I’m taking that fight to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In response to a Journal editor’s inquiry, a university spokeswoman provided a link to a June 27 statement, which says that “Cornell strictly prohibits unlawful bias or discrimination.” The statement was issued in response to an earlier, informal complaint that the America First Policy Institute filed with multiple federal agencies. The statement says Cornell “strongly disputes the allegations” in the June complaint. Cornell declined to comment on my EEOC complaint.

Last week Columbia University agreed to pay more than $220 million and adopt sweeping reforms after a federal investigation uncovered civil-rights violations. Before the Trump administration finalizes similar deals with other universities—such as Harvard, Princeton and Cornell—it should consider my case as evidence that the problem runs much deeper. Race-based hiring practices have harmed countless qualified scholars and demand serious scrutiny.

Let my case serve as a warning that there is a price for violating civil rights.

Mr. Wright is an evolutionary biologist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.