The Department of Education will give the university ten days to voluntarily resolve this noncompliance finding.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will announce today that George Mason University violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by promoting DEI practices in the university’s hiring and promotion practices, National Review has exclusively learned.
The announcement resolves a complaint filed by GMU professors alleging that since 2020, the university’s leaders have unlawfully adopted policies that promote “anti-racism” and give preferential treatment to “underrepresented groups” in its hiring and promotion practices.
The Department of Education will give the university ten days to voluntarily resolve this noncompliance finding and comply with Title VI.
At the center of the scandal is Gregory Washington, the university’s first black president, whom faculty allege spearheaded the Northern Virginia school’s diversity practices. In April 2021, for example, Washington penned a letter to the school’s faculty and staff about how to promote “inclusive excellence” in hiring. “While a majority of our students are non-white,” he wrote, “just 30 percent of our faculty are from ethnic minority, multi-ethnic, or international communities.” And to achieve the university’s vision, he continued, “we first have to adopt a broader, shared understanding of what ‘best’ means when recruiting faculty and staff at Mason.”
“If you have two candidates who are both ‘above the bar’ in terms of requirements for a position, but one adds to your diversity and the other does not,” Washington continued, “then why couldn’t that candidate be better, even if that candidate may not have better credentials than the other candidate?”
As the Washington Free Beacon recently reported, Washington insisted in a campus-wide email earlier this year that the school has “always operated with a commitment to equality under the law.” But according to employee testimony and news reports, that claim runs contrary to some of the school’s practices that were spearheaded by Washington, such as department equity advisers and policies directing hiring authorities to ask diversity-related questions of prospective faculty.
OCR’s investigation also concluded that in recent years, the university abandoned typical faculty search committee policies in favor of a policy that gives preferential treatment to prospective faculty that meet the university’s diversity standards. As recently as fall 2024, for example, the university’s website read: “the University may choose to waive the competitive search process when there is an opportunity to hire a candidate who strategically advances the institutional commitment to diversity and inclusion.”
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights also found that “before extending a job offer to an applicant, a local academic unit’s administrator secure the concurrence of the unit’s faculty, the relevant Dean, the Provost, and the ‘Office of Access, Compliance, and Community,’ which was previously named the ‘Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion before GMU renamed it in March 2025.’”
The school’s Board of Visitors has eliminated some of these DEI policies while keeping on staff the university president who spearheaded them, and even giving him a 1.5 percent raise. On August 1, the board passed a resolution affirming its commitments to a “merit-based” approach to academics and “hiring, promotion and compensation” for its faculty by eliminating DEI programs such as its Access to Research and Inclusive Excellence program. The resolution also prohibited any departments and employees from requiring employees to write “diversity statements” for tenure considerations, promotions, or any other purpose.
But OCR’s proposed agreement goes a few steps further. To ensure the school’s compliance with Title VI moving forward, OCR’s proposed agreement requires the university’s president to issue a statement to faculty and students affirming the school’s commitment to conducting “all recruitment, hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions in compliance with Title VI,” as well as informing members of the university community how to issue discrimination complaints in the future. The president’s statement, OCR said, must be prominently featured on the school’s website and must “include a personal apology from GMU’s President to the University community for promoting unlawful discriminatory practices in hiring, promotion, and tenure processes.”
“GMU will review its policies and revise any documents (e.g., instructions for hiring panels, scoring rubrics for resumes and interviews) currently used in the University recruitment, hiring, and promotion process to ensure compliance with Title VI, and remove any provisions that require or encourage the use of race to favor or disfavor any candidate,” OCR’s proposed resolution agreement continues. “GMU will conduct an annual training of all individuals involved in and responsible for recruitment, hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions to impart that GMU will not give preferences based on race, color, or national origin in these processes.”
Finally, the school must preserve all records to show that the university’s leaders comply with Title VI moving forward, as well as assign an employee the task of implementing the agreement.
“Despite this unfortunate chapter in Mason’s history, the University now has the opportunity to come into compliance with federal civil rights laws by entering into a Resolution Agreement with the Office for Civil Rights,” acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement. “In the last seven months, this much is clear: The Trump-McMahon Department of Education will not allow racially exclusionary practices—which violate the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Protection Clause, and Supreme Court precedent—to continue corrupting our nation’s educational institutions.”
OCR’s agreement is part of a broader set of administration investigations into whether the school is complying with federal law. On July 17, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced that its lawyers are probing whether the university discriminates against employees based on race and sex. Days later, the DOJ opened a second investigation into whether the school “denied equal treatment of individuals based on race or national origin, in violation of Title VI.”
This story has been updated.