An evolutionary biologist filed a lawsuit against Cornell University this week that alleges the Ivy League school used unlawful race-based hiring practices and intentionally discriminated against qualified candidates by refusing to consider White people.
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.
Wright said he was applying for similar roles in that field between 2018 and 2021. But he did not learn of the Cornell opening until last year, when whistleblowers released emails and AFPI filed a federal civil rights complaint.
A spokeswoman for Cornell declined to comment on the lawsuit Tuesday.
Last summer, in response to the AFPI complaint, a spokeswoman said Cornell strictly prohibits unlawful bias or discrimination and “strongly disputes the allegations in the America First Policy Institute complaint that references a number of outdated websites or programs that have not been in use for many years.” She said the university had “further enhanced its compliance with civil rights laws” over the past year.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars hiring or declining to hire someone based on their race, among other factors. However, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court carved out an exception for affirmative action programs that seek to remedy past discrimination. Some experts said this exception was narrow, while others said it was broad enough to cover most of what universities have done in the name of diversity.
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.
Wright, now a fellow at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, said he is seeking to ensure the university complies with federal and state employment laws as well as compensatory damages for “emotional suffering from discrimination, reputational harm, loss of employment, back pay, front pay, and lost future wages,” and punitive damages. The complaint claims he was more qualified than the person who was hired and that he lost at least $700,000 in salary.
“Cornell’s practices didn’t just cost me a job, unknown numbers of other qualified candidates were also robbed of the chance to even be considered,” Wright said.
Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York University who co-wrote a forthcoming book on how to push back against attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, said that for the case to be successful, Wright would need to show he was categorically precluded from competing for the job.
The lawsuit comes at a time when the Trump administration has been pushing to end DEI efforts at colleges and elsewhere. The president recently said that civil rights era protections led to White people being “very badly treated.”
But the Harvard admissions case has scrambled the calculus for many schools.
“In reality, many common practices are now in an ambiguous middle ground,” said Jason C. Schwartz, an attorney with expertise in employment law, who was speaking about the legal landscape generally, not about the Cornell case.
Even absent a court ruling, Yoshino expects that most universities will halt their practices. “Universities are risk-averse,” he said, “so they will stop doing it.”
In November, Cornell reached a $60 million agreement with the Trump administration to restore frozen federal research funding and close investigations. Cornell also agreed to comply with federal civil rights law, and include recent Justice Department guidelines on discrimination as a training resource for faculty and staff.
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