George Mason University President Refuses To Apologize For The School’s Diversity Efforts

Gregory Washington is defending George Mason Univeristy's diversity efforts despite pressure from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Gregory Washington, the first Black president of George Mason University, is refusing to issue a forced apology for the school’s diversity initiatives, despite a call from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to do so.

Washington is defending the university’s diversity efforts, backed by faculty, one week after OCR concluded an investigation accusing him and George Mason University of unlawful race-based hiring and violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Chronicle reports. OCR’s proposed resolution included a demand that Washington personally apologize to the campus community for the diversity initiatives he oversaw, but Washington says that’s not going to happen.

“It is glaringly apparent that the OCR investigation process has been cut short, and ‘findings’ have been made in spite of a very incomplete fact-finding process, including only two interviews with university academic deans,” Washington’s lawyer, Douglas F. Gansler, wrote in a response letter.

“For OCR to single out GMU for alleged discriminatory conduct — when it admits more than 90% of its student applicants, has no record of selectively denying faculty opportunities, and in fact boasts a faculty community nationally respected for its viewpoint diversity — borders on the absurd.”

Gansler’s letter also stressed that Washington, who joined GMU in 2020, was not directly involved in evaluating faculty candidates. It accused the government of making “gross mischaracterizations” of his statements regarding efforts to foster a welcoming environment and a racially balanced faculty at the state’s most diverse public university.

GMU appointed Washington as president in 2020 after his successful tenure as dean of the engineering school at the University of California, Irvine, where he prioritized building a diverse faculty. Since joining the Fairfax, Virginia-based college, he has launched a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence to review university policies for racial bias and revised hiring procedures to ensure greater inclusion of women and people of color in applicant pools.

After its six-week-long investigation, OCR gave George Mason leaders 10 days to agree to revise policies, retrain staff, and assign a compliance officer to oversee the changes. The proposed resolution agreement would require the university to remove “any provisions that require or encourage the use of race to favor or disfavor any candidate.”

But Gansler says abiding by the investigation and issuing an apology “would be falsely admitting to conduct that did not occur and would open GMU to further legal risk in concurrent and future investigations by other agencies.”

“What the government is really wanting to do here is to humiliate the president, and not only that, but expose him, and the university, to future legal action not only by the government but also potentially thousands of people who have applied for positions at George Mason since 2020,” said James H. Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason who strongly encouraged Washington not to apologize.

Finkelstein warns that by apologizing, Washington could expose himself to further legal trouble, asking whether a white male applicant passed over in favor of a minority or female candidate “would have a claim.”

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