Cornell University is facing a Title VII lawsuit after an evolutionary biologist alleged that the university excluded qualified white candidates from consideration for a faculty position in its Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

The plaintiff, Colin Wright, is an evolutionary biologist and former postdoctoral fellow at Pennsylvania State University. He is also a first-generation college graduate who earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and published nearly 30 peer-reviewed papers by the time he entered the academic job market.

Yet in 2020, while Wright was applying for tenure-track positions, Cornell conducted a separate faculty search in evolutionary biology without publicly posting the position. Internal emails later revealed that the search committee sought to recruit what it explicitly called a “diversity hire.”

According to Wright’s complaint, Cornell intentionally kept the opening private, in violation of its own hiring policies, which require that faculty positions be publicly posted. The purpose, Wright alleges, was to prevent qualified, white candidates like himself from applying. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Wright says that internal emails exchanged by the hiring committee, which are cited in the lawsuit, reveal an intent to recruit a “black” candidate and that the committee took steps to obscure the race-based nature of its hiring decision.

America First Policy Institute (AFPI) represents Wright through its litigation arm. Leigh Ann O’Neill, AFPI’s chief legal affairs officer, told Minding the Campus that the case is emblematic of hiring practices now common at elite institutions.

“The law is clear that race cannot be used as a basis for excluding people from employment opportunities,” O’Neill said. “But what we’re seeing in elite institutions is the adoption of policies that treat race as a relevant factor in employment decisions.”

“[S]ome institutions,” she added, “have drifted away from the legal requirement to evaluate candidates based on qualifications.” But “[t]reating race as either a barrier or a credential violates civil rights law. The long-term risk is that discrimination becomes normalized rather than eliminated.”

Wright’s lawsuit fits within a broader federal effort to enforce civil-rights law in higher education. By May 2025, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights had opened at least 100 investigations into potential civil-rights violations, many of them focused on race-based policies prohibited under Title VI and Title VII. President Donald Trump has targeted “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) practices, signing multiple executive orders directing agencies to enforce existing statutes.

That enforcement push is itself part of a broader post–affirmative action recalibration of civil-rights law, under which race-based preferences across American life are now being tested in court. As the New York Times reported, the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision ending affirmative action in admissions has been followed by a wave of lawsuits targeting DEI-based corporate hiring programs, race-restricted scholarships, and government benefits that exclude whites. In many cases, defendants have chosen to modify or abandon such programs rather than defend them. McDonald’s, for example, agreed to stop limiting a college scholarship to students with at least one parent of Hispanic origin—an eligibility requirement that now invites a more basic question about how such criteria were ever treated as legitimate in the first place.

Higher education, by contrast, has not followed corporations in pulling back; instead, it has adopted more sophisticated strategies to preserve race-based decision-making under new legal constraints. As the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal recently documented, institutions have frequently responded to federal pressure not by eliminating DEI structures, but by rebranding them.

Academia’s refusal to retreat from DEI has not gone unnoticed, however. The more institutions rely on race-based practices, the less the public trusts them. A 2025 survey by the Manhattan Institute—where Wright is a fellow—found that 45 percent of voters believe higher education is on the wrong track, and 57 percent favor a colorblind approach to admissions and hiring. 

As O’Neill put it, “Public trust erodes when institutions that are expected to uphold the law instead defend practices that contradict it. Equal treatment under the law is foundational. When that principle is compromised—whatever the cultural rationale—confidence in institutions drops.”

Cornell, for its part, denies allegations that it discriminated on the basis of race. Of course, the lawsuit will ultimately determine whether Cornell violated the law, but recent trends offer little reason to assume that institutions accused of race-based discrimination have been operating in full compliance.

In AFPI’s view, litigation remains one of the few tools capable of compelling universities to comply with civil-rights law. “The law already provides a clear roadmap,” O’Neill concluded. “Institutions simply need to follow it.”

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