I was excluded from a candidate search on the basis of my race and have filed an EEOC complaint.
I’m filing a complaint against Cornell University for racial discrimination.
This isn’t a political stunt or publicity grab. It’s a last resort in response to a gross injustice that destroyed the career I spent more than a decade building. It’s about holding accountable a powerful institution that violated the law, abandoned its principles, and discriminated against me because of my race.
I’m an evolutionary biologist, a liberal and a first-generation college graduate. I dreamed of becoming a scientist for as long as I can remember. I pursued that passion for more than 12 years—earning a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara and completing a postdoctoral position at Pennsylvania State University. Along the way, I was awarded a competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and published nearly 30 peer-reviewed papers in leading academic journals. For my career stage, I was among the top in my field.
I applied to countless tenure-track positions across the country in 2019 and 2020. One of those applications went to Cornell, for a position in their Neurobiology and Behavior department. Unknown to me, a few months later Cornell initiated a separate search for a faculty member in evolutionary biology—my exact field—but kept it confidential. Internal emails now show this was no accident.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Colin Wright is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Matt Burkhartt/Getty Images
