Cornell Hired Based on Race, Internal Documents Show

The Department of Justice should investigate for a potential violation of the Civil Rights Act.

In recent months, Ivy League universities have changed their tune on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Under pressure from President Trump, these institutions have renamed DEI departments, scuttled unpopular programs, and assured the administration that they are following the law. As Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff explained in February: “Just as we do not exclude anyone at Cornell for reasons irrelevant to merit, neither do we . . . hire or promote employees, award chairs or tenure, or make any other merit-driven decisions at Cornell based on race, ethnicity, or other attributes.”

Kotlikoff’s statement was unequivocal, but according to a trove of internal documents we have obtained, it was also untrue. In fact, whistleblowers at Cornell describe a system of intentional discrimination in faculty hiring that rewards and punishes individuals according to their ancestry, rather than their ability.

Like the other Ivies, Cornell was captured by racialist ideologies in the wake of the BLM movement. In 2020, then-president Martha Pollack announced a spate of DEI initiatives, including mandatory cultural competency training for staff, a “Community Book Read” of critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, and the development of a “for-credit educational requirement for all undergraduate students on racism, bias and equity.” More quietly, administrators redesigned the hiring process to filter applicants by race and tip the scales in favor of “diversity hires.”

A Cornell whistleblower pointed to two problematic features of the university’s hiring system. The first was its use of “diversity statements,” which allow applicants to express their commitment to left-wing racial ideology. In December 2022, a Cornell professor in one of the scientific departments wrote an email to colleagues explaining that the hiring committee would pre-filter applicants solely based on diversity statements.

“As pre-planned as a best practice, we first did a pre-screening of just the [DEI] statements submitted by the candidates; all were read by two committee members, and any that were flagged as highly suboptimal were also reviewed by a third committee member with high DEI expertise,” the email reads. “In the end, we dropped just one candidate from further consideration because their [DEI] statement was so seriously and unambiguously weak that we could not imagine them being a finalist. That same process led us to identify a few others who also had weak [DEI] statements.”

The email makes clear that DEI statements were used to reject candidates who were insufficiently committed to “diversity.” Considering that such statements effectively compel applicants to express fealty to left-wing identity politics, the requirement would conflict with Cornell’s official claim that “each individual candidate progresses through the hiring process in a fair and equitable manner, free from biases for or against any candidate.” In fact, the bias is baked in.

The second feature was the university’s pursuit of “diversity hires.” According to an email we obtained, a Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology hiring committee conducted a search process in 2020 without public notice. Then, according to the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit research center with a litigation wing that is preparing a legal complaint against Cornell’s hiring practices, the committee generated a list of candidates made up entirely of racial minorities. Finally, the email suggests, the committee reached out one by one, with the explicit goal of selecting a “diversity hire.”

“I have been having extensive e-mail and verbal discussions with Chelsea Specht, [College of Agriculture and Life Sciences] Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion, and Yael Levitte, Associate Vice Provost and Avery August, Vice Provost in the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity, about our hoped-for diversity hire,” wrote a member of the hiring committee. “Chelsea feels that the best [approach] is to invite just one person. She is concerned about us having a Search dynamic. 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.”

In other words, according to the email, the hiring process was designed to facilitate a predetermined outcome: selecting a candidate with the desired ancestry. The university not only screened out candidates based on their commitment to diversity ideology—it also screened out candidates based on their protected identity characteristics. In the end, the department selected a black woman, Swanne Gordon, who now serves as an assistant professor and “diversity and inclusion lead.”

The discriminatory hiring policies—designed in consultation with diversity bureaucrats Yael Levitte and Avery August—might also implicate Cornell president Kotlikoff. At the time, he was the university provost and their direct superior. Some faculty at Cornell would like to know: Was Kotlikoff aware of the policy of racial discrimination? While provost, was he involved in translating the university’s DEI policies into hiring practices?

This information might be forthcoming. The America First Policy Institute is preparing an official complaint to the federal government based on these internal documents and supporting whistleblower testimony. According to AFPI executive general counsel Jessica Hart Steinmann, the documents show that Cornell is guilty of an “egregious form of discrimination.”

“It appears that the Office of the Provost has played a central role in a blatant and unlawful hiring scheme that subverts federal civil rights law,” Steinmann said. “To be clear, this report demonstrates that a faculty candidate pool was deliberately pre-selected based on race, skin color, sex, and national origin—without any job opening ever being posted—ensuring that invitations would be extended only to individuals with preferred identities. This rigged process eliminated open competition and merit-based consideration and entirely eliminated unknown quantities of candidates based on their protected, immutable characteristics.”

In a written statement sent to City Journal, a Cornell spokesperson said: “Cornell’s hiring policies focus on merit and prohibit discrimination. . . . The university will promptly review any complaints about past hiring practices and take appropriate action if our anti-discriminatory hiring policies were not followed.”

The next step is persuading the Department of Justice to investigate Cornell for a potential violation of the Civil Rights Act. Fortunately, the Trump administration has made eliminating discriminatory hiring a priority of its civil-rights-enforcement efforts, and an Ivy League university makes a prominent target.

In a recent public statement, university president Kotlikoff claimed that “Cornell follows the law.” But this fantasy—and perhaps, Kotlikoff’s position—is looking increasingly untenable.