Cornell University is being accused in a federal civil rights lawsuit of excluding an evolutionary biologist from a tenured faculty position because he is white.
The America First Policy Institute filed the lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York on behalf of Colin Wright.
The complaint alleges the university violated federal law when it sought to fill a faculty position in December 2020.
The complaint cites internal documents showing that Cornell allegedly reserved the position in its Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology for candidates who satisfied a "diversity axis" — a term used in faculty emails to classify applicants by race, sexual orientation, and disability status.
According to the lawsuit, Cornell never publicly posted the job opening, as required by its own policies, and kept the hiring process hidden from potentially qualified applicants.
"This was a racial litmus test administered in secret," Leigh Ann O'Neill, AFPI's chief legal officer, said Wednesday in a statement.
"Cornell's own emails reveal they intentionally excluded white candidates, classified applicants by race, and ignored institutional hiring rules in pursuit of a so-called 'diversity hire,'" she continued.
"That's illegal, and this lawsuit will make that clear."
Wright, who earned his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology at Penn 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.
He learned about the race-based hiring process in 2025 after an internal Cornell email was made public, according to AFPI.
"Had Cornell's 'out of the ordinary' recruiting process not been revolving around a 'diversity axis' and been kept secret, Dr. Wright would have applied and is precisely the type of highly qualified applicant that Cornell should have considered," the complaint stated.
"Internal emails and spreadsheets reveal that Cornell University administrators acted to ensure the selection of an individual from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group for the tenure-track faculty position."
The complaint includes quotes from senior Cornell administrators and faculty acknowledging their intention to avoid a "search dynamic" and to offer the job only to preselected minority candidates without competition.
It also alleges an internal spreadsheet ranked candidates based on how well they met "diversity" qualifications, listing race and identity markers alongside academic credentials.
"I've been on both sides of the hiring table," Michael Shires, vice chair for Education Opportunity at AFPI and an academic leader with experience in faculty hiring, said in a statement.
"There are lawful ways to pursue inclusion and representation. But what Cornell did here was illegal," he continued.
"When a university decides that some candidates don't even deserve to know a position exists because of their skin color, that's discrimination."
In November, Cornell reached a $60 million agreement with the Trump administration to restore frozen federal research funding and close investigations.
The university 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.
Newsmax reached out to Cornell for comment.
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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