Cornell University Discriminated Against Me

Originally published on The Wall Street Journal 

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.

Last month, the America First Policy Institute released internal Cornell emails showing the university conducted an effort to recruit what the search committee referred to as a “diversity hire.” One committee member described the process bluntly: “What we should be doing is inviting one person whom we have identified as being somebody that we would like to join our department and not have that person in competition with others.” That “somebody,” who is black, was selected not because of research excellence, but because of race. I was denied the chance to compete—so were other academics who might have been qualified.

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