The Youngkin MAGAs sacked presidents at UVA, Virginia Tech and VMI – but they didn’t get Gregory Washington at George Mason University, who, it was announced on Tuesday, had his contract extended by the school’s Board of Visitors through June 30, 2031.
Washington’s contract had been set to expire in 2027.
“Since 2020, President Washington has successfully led George Mason University through historically turbulent times – navigating the COVID pandemic while simultaneously growing enrollments, improving rankings, and transforming our greatest challenges into opportunities for Virginia and the nation,” said Board of Visitors Rector Michael J. Meese, a Youngkin appointee, in a statement highlighted in a press release from GMU announcing the extension.
Washington, per Meese, “has delivered tremendous results in what matters most: record-high enrollments, graduation rates, student well-being and success, faculty excellence, research activity, state appropriations, and private donations. We are thrilled that Dr. Washington will continue to lead George Mason as we are increasingly recognized as the model for exceptional university education both now and in the future.”
As the Youngkinistas and their collaborators in the Trump DOJ were targeting Jim Ryan at UVA and Cedric Wins at VMI over DEI initiatives at their schools last spring, there was also pressure put on Washington over Mason’s Access to Research and Inclusive Excellence initiative.
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ARIE was launched by Washington, the university’s first Black president, in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder in 2020, with the stated aim to “root out any biases in Mason practices and policies with the ambition that Mason would become a national exemplar for inclusive excellence.”
The DOJ launched an investigation into ARIE last year, noting, in a press release, that “statements and policies made by the University’s president … indicate that race and sex are motivating factors in faculty hiring and other employment decisions to achieve ‘diversity’ goals.”
The full-time faculty at Mason is 67.9 percent White, with 10.1 percent identifying as Asian and 8.4 percent ID’g as Black; while GMU’s student demographics are 35 percent of the kids being White, 19.5 percent being Asian, 14.8 percent being Latino or Hispanic, and 11.4 percent being Black.
A clear point of focus in ARIE was to try to get the faculty demographics more in line with the student demographics.
Which is a noble goal, but not to the White Power folks in TrumpWorld.
“It is unlawful and un-American to deny equal access to employment opportunities on the basis of race and sex,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, an assistant in the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ, who led the spring and summer 2025 witch hunt at George Mason.
You remember Harmeet K. Dhillon – she was behind the effort to help the Youngkin-majority UVA Board of Visitors sack Jim Ryan.
“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,” said Dhillon, who, turns out, is, herself, a person of color – she was born in India, moving with her family to the States as a child so that her father could pursue training in orthopedic surgery.
Diversity for me, but not for thee.
The Board of Visitors voted to dissolve ARIE at its August meeting, but stood behind Washington against a demand from the DOJ that he and the BOV issue a statement of apology – responding to that demand in a letter in which the school said both Washington and the board were “far from needing to apologize.”
They didn’t get their scalp in this instance.
Washington was not only able to finish out his original term, but now he’s been extended.
The tide is turning.
“If you set out to create a new kind of university from scratch, built purely to respond to today’s societal priorities and the emerging educational demands of the next century, that university would look at lot like George Mason,” Washington said, in a victory lap statement highlighted in the Mason PR.
“I am at just the right university at just the right time, and I am energized to continue the work,” Washington said.
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Chris Graham
