When the Department of Justice recently opened an investigation into George Mason University over accusations that the university’s diversity programs were discriminatory, many members of the faculty were outraged.
Professors quickly published a resolution supporting their president and the university’s efforts around diversity.
Now, Justice Department officials say they will investigate the faculty, too.
In a letter sent on Friday, the Trump administration said it would seek drafts of the faculty resolution, all written communications among the Faculty Senate members who drafted the resolution, and all communications between those faculty members and the office of the university’s president, Gregory Washington.
The university referred requests for comment to an outside attorney, who did not immediately respond.
Free speech advocates quickly denounced the move as an attack on academic freedom.
The faculty resolution affirmed the university’s previous stance that “diversity is our strength.” It also defended Dr. Washington, the university’s first Black president, who has been a target of the Trump administration.
Faculty senate resolutions are positions taken by a university’s elected faculty body, like the one at George Mason. They typically carry no force and normally attract little notice beyond the campus newspaper. But these are not normal times for higher education.
The Justice Department’s interest in the faculty resolution suggested that the Trump administration was widening its targets as it escalates attacks on what it views as a left-leaning climate on college campuses.
Trump officials have accused George Mason, the largest state university in Virginia by enrollment, of having problems with antisemitism on campus. And they have said that the university’s policies encouraging the hiring and advancement of women and people of color in the faculty, and Dr. Washington’s promotion of those policies, are discriminatory.
The leaders of two other public colleges in Virginia who supported diversity efforts have lost their jobs this year.
James E. Ryan resigned as president of the University of Virginia in June under pressure from the Trump administration and from a conservative alumni group called the Jefferson Council.
In February, the Virginia Military Institute declined to renew the contract of Cedric T. Wins, its first Black superintendent, after an alumni group attacked the “woke agenda” of the state-supported military college.
Professors on the George Mason campus worry that Dr. Washington’s job will be on the line when the school’s Board of Visitors meets on Friday to examine his job performance. The board, which oversees the university, is appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who has filled it with his political allies.
Faculty members said they were concerned that a pileup of investigations would be used to justify toppling him, as happened with Dr. Ryan.
“We’re worried it’s going to be high noon on Friday,” said Tim Gibson, an associate professor at George Mason and the president of the Virginia state conference of the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group.
The federal government, he said, is rolling out “a new model of how universities are to be governed — it’s much more top-down from the federal government.”
Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote a letter on Friday to Charles Stimson, the rector of the Board of Visitors, saying the agency would be looking into the faculty’s resolution.
She said that the resolution commended Dr. Washington’s efforts “to ensure ‘faculty and staff demographics . . . mirror student demographics’ at GMU.”
“This statement is concerning,” she added, “as it indicates the GMU Faculty Senate is praising President Washington for engaging in race- or sex-motivated hiring decisions to achieve specific demographic outcomes among faculty and staff.”
Solon Simmons, a sociologist who is president of the Faculty Senate, called the government’s inquiry “flabbergasting.”
“None of us has any idea why the Department of Justice is so interested in a matter of local academic shared governance,” Dr. Simmons wrote in an email.
Dr. Simmons said Ms. Dhillon’s letter was inaccurate. The language the Justice Department took exception to was not used to praise Dr. Washington’s efforts, he said. Rather, it was a direct quote from a strategic document adopted by the Board of Visitors.
“An outcome the Board committed to was to ‘faculty and staff demographics that mirror student demographics,’” Dr. Simmons said. “It is not our language, it is theirs.”
A federal investigation of a nonbinding faculty opinion is “highly unusual,” Lindsie Rank, the director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, said in an email.
”While FIRE would prefer governing bodies such as faculty senates remain neutral on issues of political contention,” she said, “the federal government’s actions represent the latest in a pattern of shakedowns against colleges and universities that will certainly chill faculty speech.”
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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