New Details Emerge in Alleged Race-Based Hiring at Cornell
“The Cornell FIRST program was more subtle, prioritizing diversity throughout the search process rather than at the final hiring stage.”
Cornell recently responded to these claims but more information is coming out.
From City Journal:
Cornell’s Racialist Hiring Scheme
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.
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Comments
“We’ll ensure a small portion of the nation’s population receives outsized benefits, but no, it’s not racism when we do it.”
Decades ago in the company that I once worked there was a management/employee communication issue at a certain department. The investigator asked all in the department to take the Myers-Briggs test in order to better understand the underlying issue and ways of communicating and thinking. The investigator discovered that even though the employees were demographically diverse they all had the same Myers-Briggs score. The manager had a different Myers-Briggs score which provided some insight into the communication problem. So even though the employees appeared diverse they in fact processed information remarkably similarly – that is they were not diverse in logical processing.
One would think that institutions of higher learning wanting a diverse workforce would employ a lot more sophisticated and innovative methods to achieve diversity of thought than relying on demographics.
And by the way, what does the phrase “minoritized faculty” mean? Were these faculty subjected to a process that transformed their demographics from being a majority to that of a minority? Does this work for everyone? I don’t get it but then I am not smart enough to be a Cornell professor.
Excellent war story. I’m filing it.