Arlington, Virginia —The US Department of Justice has launched an investigation into whether George Mason University (GMU), located in the Northern Virginia region, based its decisions on whom to hire and promote on racial identity under the pretense of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

“It is unlawful and un-American to deny equal access to employment opportunities on the basis of race and sex,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement on Thursday announcing the probe. “When employers screen out qualified candidates from the hiring process, they not only erode trust in our public institutions—they violate the law, and the Justice Department will investigate accordingly.”

Dhillon sent a letter to GMU leadership on Thursday demanding answers “based on information that GMU may be engaged in employment practices that discriminate against employees, job applicants, and training program participants based on race and sex in violation of [the Civil Rights Act]. Specifically, we have reason to believe that during Gregory Washington’s tenure as president of GMU, race and sex have been motivating factors in faculty hiring decisions to achieve ‘diversity’ goals.”

The letter came a week after the US Department of Education announced a separate investigation into GMU “based on a complaint filed with [the Office of Civil Rights] by multiple professors at GMU who allege that the university illegally uses race and other immutable characteristics in university policies, including hiring and promotion.”

The inquiry, announced on July 10, was prompted by multiple incidents that GMU faculty came forward to formally report. The revelations they disclosed include “equity advisors” who gerrymander the racial demographics of every academic department to ensure that racial minorities — a category from which DEI advocates have historically excluded high achieving Jews and conservative people of color, arguing that in success they have achieved “white adjacent” status — are hired and promoted at higher rates than whites, even when doing so means discounting a white candidate’s record of accomplishment and intellectual ability.

GMU’s racial preferences regime has the backing of the university’s highest authority figures, the Education Department charged, arguing that university president Gregory Washington has ordered his subordinates to impose “specific mechanisms in the promotion and tenure process” which “recognize the invisible and uncredited emotional labor that people of color expend to learn, teach, discover, and work on campus.” Washington has also said explicitly that officials must hire a minority “even if that candidate may not have better credentials than” a competing applicant. Additionally, a GMU Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence operates “diversity cluster hire initiatives,” a method of hiring racial minorities which involves bypassing traditional hiring procedures.

“Despite the leadership of George Mason University claiming that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, it appears that its hiring and promotion policies and practices from 2020 to the present, implemented under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, and inclusion,’ not only allow but champion illegal racial preferencing in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the Education Department’s acting assistant civil rights secretary, Craig Trainor, said in a statement. “The Trump-McMahon Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights will investigate this matter fully to ensure that individuals are judged based on their merit and accomplishment, not the color of their skin.”

The Education Department’s investigation continues the Trump administration’s offensive against a higher education policy regime which emerged in the 1960s to remedy racial inequality in the US but has since evolved to incorporate ideologies which conservatives say promote antisemitism, racial segregation in campus housing, reverse-discrimination, and anti-capitalism.

In June, James Ryan resigned as president of University of Virginia (UVA), a move which the US Justice Department stipulated as a condition of settling a civil rights case brought against the institution over its use of racial preferences in admissions and hiring, a policy it too justified as advancing DEI.

Ryan drew the scrutiny of the Justice Department, having allegedly defied a landmark Supreme Court ruling which outlawed establishing racial identity as the determinant factor for admission to the university as well as a series of executive orders US President Donald Trump issued to shutter DEI initiatives being operated in the public and private sectors. Such programs have been accused of fostering a new “anti-white” bigotry which penalizes individual merit and undermines the spirit of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement by, for example, excluding white males from jobs and prestigious academic positions for which they are qualified.

Another DEI-adjacent policy was identified at UVA in 2024, when the Equal Protection Project, a Rhode Island based nonprofit, filed a civil rights complaint against the university which argued that its holding a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) Alumni-Student Mentoring Program is discriminatory, claiming no public official would think it appropriate to sanction a mentoring program for which the sole membership criterion is being white. UVA later changed the description of the program, claiming that it is open to “all races, ethnicities, and national origins” even as it stressed that it was “created with BIPOC students in mind.”

The university’s tactics were allegedly employed to hide other DEI programs from lawmakers and taxpayers, with Ryan reportedly moving and concealing them behind new names. He quickly exhausted the patience of the Trump Justice Department, which assumed office only months after the BIPOC program was reported to federal authorities.

Similar practices were notably alleged in a 2024 lawsuit which accused Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law of discriminating against white male applicants.

The complaint alleged that high-level officials went to great lengths to conceal the law school’s allegedly discriminatory hiring, going as far as banning frank discussions about them on a digital messaging forum to avoid “litigation risk.” This code of silence, it argued, enabled the rejection of a job application submitted by Professor Eugene Volokh, a “renowned legal scholar” who has taught law for three decades and is cited in numerous opinions issued by the US Supreme Court. Volokh also clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman ever to serve on the country’s highest court.

At the time, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, founder of higher education antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner that, in addition to undermining civil rights, racial preferences have fostered antisemitism on college campuses. Admissions and hiring committees packed with progressive ideologues, she said, not only prefer non-white candidates but also aim to ensure that new hires are ideologically progressive — and, moreover, anti-Zionist. The effect of this, she explained, is that Jews in higher education, whom mainstream progressive ideology classifies as white, are also subject to discrimination, an issue The Algemeiner has covered extensively.

“Racial preferences pit racial identity against the meritocracy, and one of the reasons that Jews have become so prominent in academia is because it is a system that rewards talent, character, and grit. Jews tend to be well-educated and highly achieving, and when an institution’s primary concern is the quality of the individual as opposed to the color of his or her skin or perceived background, Jews excel,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “What the university stands for, academic integrity and excellence, are values that have lifted Jews up in America, and, in addition to being critical for advancing humanity, they have been one of the most important sources of our strength in this country.”

She continued, “However, when you impose academic criteria that has nothing to do with those values and nothing to do with academic integrity but everything to do with a political agenda that really at its core is discriminatory and hateful — and antisemitic — you make the university not just a hostile place for Jews but also a hostile place for learning.”

Rossman-Benjamin further argued that progressives have effortlessly “captured” higher education institutions over the past several decades and that their predominance in academia and the explosion of antisemitism on campuses across the US are directly linked.

“What’s so interesting is that the way you know that contemporary progressivism is not just a fraudulent and bankrupt ideology but an evil one, is that it produces antisemitism,” she continued. “Antisemitism is a bellwether of its malevolence. If it were positive and healthy, it would lift people up — but it isn’t. In fact, it is hurting them in the deepest ways.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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