The Education Department has launched a federal civil rights investigation into George Mason University for renaming rather than removing its diversity, equity and inclusion program and staff.
In a Thursday news release, the agency cited a complaint filed with its Office for 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.”
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said the complaint belies administrators’ public claims that the private Fairfax campus “does not discriminate on the basis of race” by favoring minority candidates, which the Trump administration forbids.
“This kind of pernicious and widespread discrimination — packaged as anti-racism — was allowed to flourish under the Biden administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” Mr. Trainor said. “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.”
According to the complaint, George Mason University President Gregory Washington announced in a March email the renaming of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion department as the Office of Access, Compliance and Community.
Beyond renaming, the complaint said Mr. Washington wrote that the university needn’t make any changes because it has “always complied with existing civil rights laws.”
In a statement emailed to The Washington Times, the university reaffirmed its nondiscrimination stance and pledged to “work in good faith” with the investigation.
“George Mason University again affirms its commitment to comply with all federal and state mandates,” the statement read. “The university consistently reviews its policies and practices to ensure compliance with federal laws, updated executive orders and ongoing agency directives.”
The complaint comes as part of a broader federal effort to enforce a January executive order from President Trump ending public funding for race-based programs designed to support Black, Latino and American Indian students and faculty.
In March, the Education Department opened a civil rights investigation into 45 universities for engaging in “race-exclusionary practices” in graduate admissions rather than accepting students based on merit. Schools under investigation include Yale, Duke, New York University, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Ohio State and the University of Chicago.
At the same time, the federal agency announced it was probing seven other schools for “race-based scholarships and race-based segregation.” Those schools include the University of South Florida, Ithaca College and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
More recently, University of Virginia President James Ryan resigned last month amid a Justice Department investigation into his refusal to end DEI practices at the state’s flagship public campus.
The UVa. Board of Visitors voted in March to dismantle all DEI-based scholarships, hiring, admissions and programs. However, the Justice Department investigation accused the school of rebranding the infrastructure and giving its staff new titles to keep doing the same work.
America First Legal, a pro-Trump group, sent the Justice Department a 98-page letter detailing UVa.’s noncompliance with federal policies.
The letter noted that UVa.’s business school replaced its “Diversity and Inclusion” web page with an “Inclusive Excellence” page while retaining a chief diversity officer to oversee race-based scholarships and programs.
Mr. Ryan’s resignation sparked a raft of complaints from Democratic officials and academics, who accused Mr. Trump of threatening to withhold federal funding from the school if the UVa. president didn’t depart.
It also drew cheers from longtime critics of academic DEI initiatives. Promoted by the Biden administration, DEI has sought for decades to give underrepresented minorities a leg up in faculty hiring and admissions to make their numbers reflect wider U.S. demographics.
“University administrators should spend less time defending DEI and more time bringing their universities into compliance with the civil rights laws,” said William A. Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor and founder of the Equal Protection Project, which supports color-blind civil rights policies. “DEI is a group-identity ideology that is inconsistent with treating individuals as individuals entitled to equal protection under the Constitution and civil rights laws.”
On Thursday, the Education Department pointed to several examples of George Mason University defying the Trump administration’s color-blind interpretation of equal rights.
The complaint noted the persistence of “equity advisers in every academic department” for faculty recruiting, directives from Mr. Washington to “develop specific mechanisms in the promotion and tenure process” to favor people of color, and the creation of a “metric-based template” to ensure the “vision and definition of anti-racism and inclusiveness” in academic units.
It also noted the creation of a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence to craft university policies that “advance systemic and cultural anti-racism,” including “diversity cluster hire initiatives” to eliminate “demographic diversity” gaps between faculty and students.
Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, called the investigation into these practices “nonsense.”
“For so many Trump supporters, any form of equality looks like oppression and they fight it,” Mr. Dibinga said. “GMU is about to be added to the growing list of schools that students won’t apply to because they are being forced to backtrack on their DEI initiatives. It’s disgraceful.”
But Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, said George Mason “has been a notorious scofflaw” of legal efforts to roll back DEI since the Supreme Court overturned race-based preferences for college admissions in June 2023.
“President Washington has all but publicly announced that GMU under his direction would thwart the law, and the word in the academic community is that GMU is one of the places where racial discrimination is not just tolerated but rewarded and celebrated,” said Mr. Wood, a former associate provost at Boston University. “Some of the GMU players belong behind bars.”
