Carl Neuss ’76 is a Cornell alumnus with a background in civil engineering and real estate development. Neuss also holds degrees from Master’s of Business Administration from Harvard University and a Master’s of Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
U.S. academia is now reeling under the implications of Professor Jason Arday’s scandal at University of Cambridge. The Ivy League and their alumni must address their own longstanding ‘Jason Arday type’ discriminatory hiring policies. Any hiring or admissions discrimination is egregious enough — but putting unqualified persons in tenure positions puts all Ivy schools on the fast track toward the destruction of the reputations for excellence which these universities (and their alumni) have spent decades building. Further to this, with tenured professorships, our country’s best students will be both cheated and profoundly discouraged for decades as they watch ‘favored identifies’ advance over more deserving persons while merit-based advancement is deemphasized.
It must be realized that such harmful DEI-driven actions are not limited to just one unearned position. Apart from hundreds of such university hires, countless students, faculty, staff and members of the public are all now watching and understanding the charade which elite university education, operating under the social justice agenda in America, has now become. Imagine the discouragement to millions of American students and citizens as the Ivies make clear that capabilities and competence pale in comparison to the dominance of social justice and identity politics in selecting faculty, staff and students.
All the Ivy League schools have implemented Arday-type hiring practices — a lack of due diligence on the qualifications of DEI candidates, the disregard for transparent accountability by universities in disclosing their hiring policies, the often flagrant disregard for adhering to laws that prevent hiring based on race — as political and social activism have supplanted scholarly merit as the top priority in our country’s most prestigious universities. The presidents of Ivy League institutions are collectively examples of the wrong leadership pushing misguided DEI priorities at Ivy schools. Unfortunately, ridding these schools of such leadership does not solve the problem because ‘personnel = policy.’
The Ivies have been prioritizing social justice for so long, their faculties and administrations are now captured by DEI ideology and social justice operatives. Therefore, as failed Ivy presidents are replaced, subsequent university leaders intend to push the very same DEI-ideology; for example, after Claudine Gay was removed from leadership at Harvard University, her replacement, Alan M. Garber openly defended the DEI practices that lost Gay her position. In other words, these newly promoted administrators hope that today’s anti-DEI storm will soon pass and a return to social justice policy priorities can continue in full force. Thus, current Ivy leadership will likely ‘play possum’ for a bit, then as soon as public scrutiny subsides, return to their discriminatory and anti-merit woke priorities.
Like other schools, Cornell is a victim of the cadre of woke administrators waiting to fill the position of past President Martha Pollack. Current President Michael Kotlikoff is an example of the ‘personnel = policy’ obstacles which will prevent needed reform at Cornell.
A well-documented Cornell legal case of blatant and unlawful DEI-driven faculty hiring discrimination, Wright v. Cornell University, is now being advanced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Cornell Faculty Hiring Discrimination Case exposes the University’s illegal hiring practices and illuminates major obstacles to bringing necessary reform to Cornell and the other Ivies. It should be recognized by all that President Kotlikoff was the University Provost (the second-highest administrator under President Pollack) whose DEI staff designed and implemented the unlawful faculty hiring practices across many academic departments at Cornell.
When an administrator implicated in unlawful hiring practices becomes University president in the post-Pollack era, it seems denials and a continuation of dysfunction would be the likely course under such new University leadership. New leadership blood at Cornell is desperately needed — not a recycling of past obfuscation and mismanagement of Cornell and its legacy.
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