George Mason University’s president led faculty-diversity initiatives that constituted illegal racial discrimination and lied to Congress about his role in those initiatives, the House Judiciary Committee said Thursday.
In an interim staff report released Thursday, the Republican-led committee accused Gregory Washington, the university’s first Black president, of lying when he testified before the committee in September about his involvement in implementing race-based policies that emerged from an antiracism task force and which sought to match the racial diversity of the faculty to that of the student body.
“The available evidence suggests that Dr. Washington was ultimately responsible for the initiation and implementation of these discriminatory practices at GMU,” the committee wrote. The group also accused Washington of making “numerous incendiary and offensive racial comments” that influenced hiring decisions.
According to the report, Washington told a dean that there were “too many Asians” in the hiring pool for a top position. The committee attributed that claim to Ken Randall, the university’s law-school dean, whom it interviewed last month. The report cites the same interview in stating that Washington moved a Black candidate onto a shortlist for the university’s vice president for research position, telling the committee it should “give the brother a chance.” That person was ultimately hired, the report states.
Washington’s lawyer, Douglas F. Gansler, said Washington never met with the search committee or made such a comment, “nor would he.”
“That meeting never happened — he never had a meeting with the search committee and could not have said, ‘Give the brother a chance,’” Gansler said. “That’s just racism on its face by these people.”
The committee’s report claims that policy handed down by Washington amounted to racial quotas in hiring. In the School of Engineering, the School of Policy and Government, and the College of Science, administrators adopted plans to institute “racial hiring quotas,” the document states.
The report includes documents from the School of Policy and Government showing explicit goals to hire 12 tenure-track faculty at a ratio of 33-percent “underrepresented minorities” and 50-percent “minorities”; the School of Engineering with goals to hire five new full-time faculty from underrepresented racial backgrounds; and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution’s goal to “increase faculty diversity to equal the diversity of [its] student population,” while providing a numerical racial background of the student body.
“In each of these schools, the proportion of minority faculty increased following the creation of racial discrimination plans,” the committee said.
The committee cited testimony from a confidential George Mason administrator in claiming that Washington had punished schools that did not comply with racially discriminatory plans by stripping 6 percent from their operating budgets.
“You’d get fired if you didn’t have a plan,” said Randall, the law dean, in his testimony.
Gansler called the government’s latest attacks on Washington “a political lynching,” adding that the diversity goals were equity advisers’ recommendations, not requirements. Gansler denied the claim that anyone’s budget was reduced for failing to meet the requirements.
The committee is likely to send a criminal referral about its findings to the Justice Department, Gansler said. (The Washington Post first reported this likelihood, citing government sources.)
“These politicians in Congress can say what they want with impunity,” Gansler said. “But when they get in a court of law, they have to follow the facts and there are no facts here.”
The university’s Board of Visitors in a statment said they are reviewing the findings of the report. “The Board remains focused on serving our students, faculty and the Commonwealth, ensuring full compliance with federal law and positioning GMU for continued excellence,” they wrote.
The committee’s findings follow findings from the Department of Education, which announced in August that it had determined the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In its findings, the department said that the university implemented racial quotas in hiring and it demanded that Washington issue a public apology to the university community. Washington has refused to do so.
Washington has long said that the university’s definition of diversity did not refer only to racial diversity, a claim he repeated in his testimony before the committee. (The university has since abandoned its diversity initiatives.)
“As the Board knows, in George Mason’s Strategic Plan, diversity is referenced as ‘diversity of origin, identity, circumstance, and thought,’” Gansler wrote in a letter defending Washington in August.
In addition to the Education Department, the Department of Justice is investigating George Mason’s hiring and admissions practices.
Washington and George Mason’s efforts to diversify faculty have done little to change the racial makeup of its professors, according to data from the university. Since 2021, 80 percent of the university’s 211 hires have been white and Asian.
“Somebody was lying and it wasn’t Dr. Washington,” Gansler said. “This is political theater at its best.”
Katherine Mangan contributed to this report .
