Gregory N. Washington, the first Black president of George Mason University, remembers the tumult on campus as he began his new job in 2020.
It was the era of Black Lives Matter, and students were protesting over the man the school is named after, a complicated Virginia historical figure and slaveholder. Demonstrators were demanding that a statue of Mason on campus be torn down, Dr. Washington said.
Five years later, George Mason’s statue remains intact, and politics are once again convulsing college campuses. But instead of contending with student protests, today Dr. Washington — who made it his mission to reduce racial tensions at George Mason — is in the cross hairs of the Trump administration, accused of violating the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against white academics in hiring and promotions.
President Trump’s interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, historically aimed at protecting Black people and members of other minority groups from discrimination, has infuriated his critics. And as if to twist the knife, the Trump administration has also demanded a personal public apology from Dr. Washington over his efforts to support racial diversity — which it described as unlawful and discriminatory.
Dr. Washington has refused.
“It’s to protect my reputation and the reputation of the campus,” he said in an interview last week.
The refusal has made the George Mason president one of the few university leaders who has explicitly, and publicly, challenged the Trump administration. He joins a short list of other higher education leaders, including the presidents of Harvard and Princeton.
But unlike many of his peers, Dr. Washington has been targeted as an individual, and so his choice to resist the Trump administration’s demands leaves him in an uncommonly precarious position.
“Singling out a Black leader in this way is not only unprecedented but also deeply troubling,” the university chapter of the American Association of University Professors said in a statement last week.
The Trump administration has made attacking universities central to its agenda. Higher education leaders argue that their institutions are the pillars of fact-based scientific inquiry and freedom of expression. President Trump and his supporters have argued they are elitist and focused on indoctrinating new generations into liberal ideologies.
But George Mason stands in stark contrast to the exclusive institutions Mr. Trump has targeted. It offers admission to 90 percent of its applicants. Many are middle-class students from Northern Virginia.
It is also among the most diverse campuses in the country.
Dr. Washington has faced some criticism from faculty at George Mason, over his handling of diversity, but also of pro-Palestinian protests on campus, but many support him. The claims that he violated the Civil Rights Act have taken Dr. Washington by surprise. The U.S. Education Department gave him a deadline of Sept. 1 to agree to issue an apology.
“It’s very confusing and frustrating, to be honest with you,” he said.
At several other universities, federal pressure — first from Congressional Republicans — has led to the resignation of high-profile presidents. The Trump administration’s cancellation of millions in federal funds has put school leaders under even more duress. On Thursday, Northwestern University’s president, Michael Schill, who has faced aggressive questioning by Congressional Republicans, stepped down, after the Trump administration also froze nearly $800 million from the school.
But few presidents have been targeted quite as personally as Dr. Washington.
The Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, upped the pressure in a statement last month, saying Dr. Washington “waged a university-wide campaign to implement unlawful D.E.I. policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race,” the statement said, adding, “You can’t make this up.”
Already, Dr. Washington’s job appeared in jeopardy amid speculation that some right-leaning members of the George Mason board would like to see him ousted.
For his part, Dr. Washington says his life has been guided by “grace,” and he has often invoked a Bible passage from Isaiah as his guiding star: “No weapon formed against me shall prosper.”
Now 59, he was born in Harlem to a 15-year-old mother. At 12, while standing on a street corner, he witnessed a drug deal for the first time. Of a couple dozen friends he hung out with on 130th Street, only three made it out, he has said.
“And when I say ‘made it out,’ I mean we’re not dead, in prison, or doing drugs,” he told an assembly of students in 2016.
The family moved to Raleigh, N.C., where he joined a small minority of Black students at a mostly white high school. He adapted and prospered, earning three degrees in mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University.
He eventually became dean of engineering at the University of California-Irvine. His support for diversity in that job was seen as a positive when he was selected George Mason president. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, was governor, and his administration was developing the One Virginia Plan, a statewide effort to promote diversity.
Shortly after taking office at George Mason, Virginia’s largest public university, Dr. Washington announced a task force on diversity. “My vision is establishing George Mason University as a national exemplar of anti-racism and inclusive excellence in action,” he said at the time.
Dr. Washington noted that the demographics of George Mason’s faculty didn’t mirror its diverse student body. Among his priorities was a plan to encourage diversity among faculty and staff members — now the crux of the Trump administration’s complaint against him.
The agency’s nine-page complaint cited, among other things, a comment in 2021 from Dr. Washington that was posted on George Mason’s website.
“If you have two candidates who are both ‘above the bar’ in terms of requirements for a position, but one adds to your diversity and the other does not, then why couldn’t that candidate be better, even if that candidate may not have better credentials than the other candidate?”
Bryan D. Caplan, a professor of economics and critic of Dr. Washington’s diversity initiatives, said he felt “thinly veiled pressure” to hire minority candidates.
“When I was on the hiring committee in 2020, we went through multiple training sessions with the D.E.I. office,” Dr. Caplan said. “They also appointed someone from outside our department to monitor us to make sure we were giving proper consideration to diversity.”
Even at the time, Dr. Washington emphasized that he was not advocating a quota system in hiring.
Timothy A. Gibson, president of the campus A.A.U.P. chapter, has argued the allegations of favoritism are not true. An analysis by Dr. Gibson, a communications professor, of faculty racial demographics from 2015 to fall 2024 shows that they’ve remained fairly constant, with about 63 percent of the full-time faculty listed as white.
“I think what they have are stories from faculty members who are politically opposed to D.E.I. for philosophical and ideological reasons,” Dr. Gibson said of the Education Department.
Dr. Washington has hired a well-known lawyer, the former Maryland attorney general Douglas F. Gansler, who has accused the Trump administration of “gross mischaracterizations” of Dr. Washington’s conduct.
Mr. Gansler pointed out that the Education Department had failed to identify a single George Mason job applicant who was victimized by discrimination.
Located less than an hour’s drive from the White House, the university’s proximity to Washington may well have placed it in focus. Some faculty members at its Scalia Law School, named after the conservative Supreme Court justice who died in 2016, have also been critical of Dr. Washington. And George Mason has longstanding ties to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has sparred with Dr. Washington over the school’s focus on diversity.
One Heritage Foundation official, Charles Stimson, serves as chair of George Mason’s board. A former board member, Lindsey Burke, helped write Project 2025, a right-leaning blueprint for the Trump administration that has called for ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs. She is currently an official at the Education Department.
But the Trump administration’s continuing push at George Mason also follows a stormy year in Virginia’s highly regarded public university system, much of it involving disputes over D.E.I. programs.
First, conservatives on the board of Virginia Military Institute declined to renew the contract of Maj, Gen. Cedric T. Wins, its first Black superintendent, whom they had accused of leading a “woke” realignment of the school.
In June, the president of the University of Virginia, James E. Ryan, resigned under unusually overt pressure from the Justice Department, which objected to his robust support for campus diversity initiatives.
Mr. Ryan’s resignation may have emboldened the Trump administration.
“If they can knock down someone like Greg Washington, that’s just one more domino that falls,” said James H. Finkelstein, an emeritus professor at George Mason who has studied university presidencies.
Faculty members at George Mason have been largely supportive of Dr. Washington. They note progress he has made, including an increase in enrollment, improved finances and a spike in the U.S. News & World Report rankings — to No. 52 among public universities.
Dr. Washington points to a series of changes his administration made in the past year to comply with shifting guidance from both Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, and the Trump administration on diversity initiatives.
“We’ve made dramatic changes to our D.E.I. infrastructure in order to meet what we believe was the current framework that this administration was using,” he said.
Now, though, he thinks he is being held responsible retroactively for violating regulations that weren’t in place.
“They are literally investigating me for what they call offenses I made back in 2020, 2021 and that’s problematic,” he said. “It’s like changing the speed limit and charging you for speeding four years ago.”
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
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