John D. Sailer Cornell’s Racialist Hiring Scheme The university’s FIRST program mandated “diverse” lists of finalists.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/cornell-university-hiring-race-first-program
At Cornell University, faculty search committees adopted a series of checkpoints to ensure that job candidates were sufficiently “diverse.” Internal documents I’ve reviewed raise questions about whether the university unlawfully used racial preferences in hiring—and offer a revealing look at the tactics of Cornell’s social-justice advocates.
In 2021, Cornell received $16 million from the National Institutes of Health to help start its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, aimed at increasing the faculty’s “compositional diversity” by hiring ten new professors. According to the program’s grant proposal and progress reports, its leadership team screened applicants at four stages—the initial pool, longlist, shortlist, and finalist slate—to ensure “as diverse a pool as possible.” These checkpoints aligned with the program’s stated objective: “Cornell University aims to increase the number of minoritized faculty in the biological, biomedical, and health sciences through establishing an NIH FIRST Program at Cornell University.” The university pledged to hire the ten new professors specifically from “groups underrepresented in their fields.”
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. Had Cornell restricted these faculty positions to certain racial groups, it would have plainly violated the law. The Cornell FIRST program was more subtle, prioritizing diversity throughout the search process rather than at the final hiring stage.
Still, the program’s carefully structured, four-stage process—explicitly designed to shape the racial composition of the candidate pool—raises legal concerns. “Each search will be governed by a clear process and 4 checkpoints,” the FIRST proposal notes, “to ensure that the search has as diverse a pool as possible.” The process is described step by step.
After reviewing the initial applicant pool, the Cornell FIRST leadership team would assess its demographic makeup. If the pool were “not sufficiently diverse,” the search would be paused for “additional robust outreach.”
Next, the hiring committee would compile a “long-short list” of candidates for remote interviews. Again, FIRST leadership would intervene: “If the FIRST Institutional Steering Committee determines that this short list pool does not reflect the goals of the FIRST program[], the search will NOT move forward,” the proposal states.
In that case, the leadership team would instruct the search committee to reconsider candidates who didn’t make the cut—in the proposal’s words, to “revisit the applicant pool so as to enhance the diversity of the pool of proposed candidates.”
The FIRST team repeated that process—whereby eliminated candidates received a “second look,” with the goal of boosting diversity—for both the shortlist (“checkpoint #3”) and the finalist slate (“checkpoint #4”). For the last checkpoint, the proposal notes that, if the list didn’t meet the program’s diversity criteria (“reflecting the goals of the NIH FIRST program”), the committee would again pause the search, reevaluate previously rejected candidates, and propose a new list, in line with the program’s goals.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it unlawful for employers to “limit, segregate, or classify . . . applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment” on the basis of race. By demanding that search committees repeatedly revise their selections to ensure “as diverse a pool as possible,” the Cornell FIRST program was tailored to yield discriminatory results.
“I can imagine an argument that Cornell’s first checkpoint doesn’t treat anyone differently or worse than anyone else, serving only to assure that the school has created broad awareness of an opening,” says Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. But continuing that process later down the line virtually compels worse treatment of those who did make the cut. “That certainly looks like a Title VII violation,” he said, “unless the school can show how they fit into one of the existing exceptions to Title VII’s general rule of equal treatment.”
The hiring scheme also provides a window into the machinations of Cornell’s social-justice advocates. With the aid of federal money, a small team at Cornell built an elaborate mechanism to micromanage the hiring process and mold it according to a racialist ideology.
That’s important. Legal questions aside, this hiring program was based on a specific philosophy of higher education that sought to raise the salience of the categories of race, sex, and ethnicity. As my colleagues Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe have shown, these goals were broadly shared across the university. Cornell FIRST helped to make those goals a reality.
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