George Mason, which named its law school after Antonin Scalia, which gets millions from the likes of Charles Koch, is facing a civil rights investigation from the Trump Justice Department.
Actually, saying that wrong – George Mason isn’t under investigation, as much as, its Black president, Gregory Washington, is under investigation.
“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 is leading this particular witch hunt.
You remember Harmeet K. Dhillon – she was behind the effort to help the Glenn Youngkin-majority UVA Board of Visitors get rid of Jim Ryan.
ICYMI
The full-time faculty at Mason is two-thirds White, with 10 percent identifying as Black, Latino or Hispanic, so naturally, the focus of the Trump DOJ is on efforts at the school to try to diversify.
“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, not for thee.
The DOJ issued a press release on this nonsense on Thursday saying the investigation “stems from statements and policies made by the University’s president, which indicate that race and sex are motivating factors in faculty hiring and other employment decisions to achieve ‘diversity’ goals.”
The numbers suggest that the school is still falling well short of even coming close of achieving actual diversity – 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.
What they’re trying to do there is probably obvious: just get closer to having the faculty resemble the student population.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight, clearly.
“Think about it this way,” Timothy Gibson, the president of the Virginia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said. “GMU has one of the most diverse student populations in the nation. Yet the full-time instructional faculty at Mason is far less diverse, with nearly two-thirds identifying as white but only about 10 percent identifying as Black or Latino/Hispanic. The idea that somehow applicants of color are getting some kind of systemic preference is ludicrous.”
That would be assuming that the Trump DOJ is being at all honest about what it’s trying to do here.
Pretty clear what the actual aim is: they’re going at a Black guy who is the president of a school that is efforting to be more inclusive.
This is a win-win with the White supremacists and their self-loathing people of color co-conspirators in MAGA world.
Get the scalp of the Black guy, and gutting the diversity program is just icing on the cake.
Then, the thumb can go back on the scale to help White applicants, like has always been the case.
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Chris Graham
