Lawsuit Claims Cornell Used ‘Diversity Axis’ in Hiring
29th January 2026
Cornell University is being accused in a federal civil rights lawsuit of excluding an evolutionary biologist from a tenured faculty position because he is white.
The America First Policy Institute filed the lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York on behalf of Colin Wright.
The complaint alleges the university violated federal law when it sought to fill a faculty position in December 2020.
The complaint cites internal documents showing that Cornell allegedly reserved the position in its Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology for candidates who satisfied a “diversity axis” — a term used in faculty emails to classify applicants by race, sexual orientation, and disability status.
According to the lawsuit, Cornell never publicly posted the job opening, as required by its own policies, and kept the hiring process hidden from potentially qualified applicants.
“This was a racial litmus test administered in secret,” Leigh Ann O’Neill, AFPI’s chief legal officer, said Wednesday in a statement