Updated July 18

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a new investigation of George Mason University, it announced Thursday, marking the third federal probe of the Fairfax County university opened in July.

Like the two previously announced investigations, which were opened by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the DOJ’s probe specifically targets George Mason President Gregory Washington. A letter from Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the DOJ’s civil rights division, says: “We have reason to believe that during Gregory Washington’s tenure as president of GMU, race and sex have been motivating factors in faculty hiring decisions to achieve ‘diversity’ goals.”

In other words, Washington “openly advocated for race- and sex-based hiring processes at GMU” that are biased against white and male faculty candidates and employees, the letter states, and the university “may be engaged in employment practices that discriminate against employees, job applicants and training program participants based on race and sex in violation of Title VII.” The letter was sent to George Mason Rector Charles “Cully” Stimson on Thursday, as well as Torridon Law attorney Mike Fragoso, who has been hired to represent George Mason. Typically, the state attorney general’s office represents state university officials.

On Friday, Washington sent an email to the university community addressing the new investigation. He writes that “because the Board of Visitors has opted to outsource the university’s engagement with federal agencies to the Torridon Law firm, university staff is not able to make direct contact with the DOJ in order to learn more about the complaint.

“Regardless, we will as always work in good faith to cooperate fully with the investigation, and are gathering requested information as required,” Washington writes. “We remain confident that facts and evidence show that George Mason does not engage in ‘illegal DEI,’ as the general accusation has been labeled.” 

The DOJ released the letter Thursday with a news release; Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the civil rights division, is the same official who sent letters in May and June to former University of Virginia President Jim Ryan that demanded U.Va. prove that it was dismantling its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Ryan resigned in June and left office July 11, citing the DOJ’s pressure and threats to federal funding for the university’s researchers and student aid recipients. According to multiple reports, another DOJ attorney, Gregory Brown, said Ryan needed to resign, or U.Va.’s federal funding would be pulled.

In the letter, Dhillon cites “internal emails” sent to George Mason faculty members in 2020, just as Washington had taken office. In July 2020, just weeks into his term, Washington wrote to a faculty listserv that he “intended to ‘develop’ a ‘renewal, promotion, and tenure process’ to benefit ‘faculty of color and women in their professional work.'” He also allegedly wrote that “he will ‘develop specific mechanisms in the promotion and tenure process that recognize the invisible and uncredited emotional labor that people of color expend to learn, teach, discover, and work on campus,'” the letter said.

Dhillon also writes that in November 2020, Washington said in a video town hall that he “will advance an agenda of ‘antiracism’ as president of GMU,” and in 2022, Washington celebrated the work of a university employee who “helped incorporate DE&I in curriculum, the hiring process & more” in an X post. She adds that she has authorized a full investigation by her office “to determine whether GMU is engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination.”

Washington wrote in his email to the campus that “parts of the complaint are based on outdated digital posts,” and he explains in an eight-paragraph section titled “Historical context” that the atmosphere in 2020 was quite different from today.

Different atmosphere

His 2022 tweet and November 2020 town hall quote “occurred in the wake of several tragic events culminating in George Floyd’s murder. As part of addressing this national reckoning, we were examining ourselves, looking for ways to become better.” Also, he added, “being Virginia’s largest and most diverse public university meant government leaders and the public expected George Mason to play a meaningful part in creating structures and programming to address old biases and persistent inequalities in business operations.”

Washington further notes that then-Gov. Ralph Northam launched the ONE Virginia plan in March 2021 to “advance ‘inclusive excellence across state agencies,'” including public universities. “George Mason did as expected by state government,” the president wrote. Part of the state code of law still requires all state agencies to “establish and maintain a comprehensive diversity, equity and inclusion strategic plan in coordination with” the governor’s office, Washington added. “This is current law in Virginia.”

He adds that under Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who took office in 2022, new GMU Board of Visitors members who voiced criticism of DEI efforts began to call for a scaling back of the university’s DEI initiatives in late 2023, even though the ONE Virginia plan had not yet been rolled back. By 2025, though, after two university committees’ one-year study, “the board instructed us to dismantle programs and reassign or eliminate staff, which we have done.”

Washington writes that despite the shifts in policy under different governors, “we have leaned on our institutional values and stayed true to our core ethos to remain a constant beacon of welcoming and inclusivity to everyone who seeks us out.” He added that “it is inaccurate to conclude that we created new university policies or procedures that discriminated against or excluded anyone.

“Being under such federal investigations is not familiar territory to George Mason, and I understand how this can be upsetting and distractive to so many who work or study here,” he concludes. “As we work through this, it is my hope that we will be granted due process to explain in detail much of what I have highlighted above.”

Outside legal assistance

Eric Sell, an acting deputy assistant attorney general who joined the DOJ as counsel in April, has been assigned to the investigation, Dhillon writes. According to Sell’s LinkedIn page, he is a 2021 graduate of American University’s Washington College of Law and previously was associate litigation counsel for the Center for American Liberty, a conservative nonprofit Dhillon helped found in 2018.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights on July 10 launched a probe investigating whether GMU has favored employees of underrepresented races in hiring and promotions, with similar allegations as the DOJ letter lays out. On July 1, the same DOE office opened a separate Title VI investigation into allegations that George Mason failed to protect Jewish students and faculty from antisemitism after the war in Gaza prompted campus protests around the country starting in October 2023.

James Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason, said Thursday that the third investigation “raises the stakes considerably for the university. The Commonwealth of Virginia doesn’t appear to be mounting a vigorous defense for the university,” which he speculates led to the board’s hiring of Torridon Law to represent them in this matter.

Fragoso, the attorney included in the DOJ’s letter to Stimson, is not registered to practice law in Virginia, according to the Virginia State Bar’s directory. Finkelstein, who co-wrote an op-ed in Washington’s defense, noted that Torridon Law was founded by Bill Barr, who served as U.S. attorney general during Trump’s first term, and Fragoso was chief counsel to U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who recently stepped down as the Senate Republican leader.

“It is what it looks like,” Finkelstein said. “It’s another example of the Trump administration using pressure tactics to try to remove another president of a public university, just as they did at U.Va. It’s serious.”

A spokesperson for George Mason did not respond immediately for a request for comment Thursday night, but last week, the university noted that it “does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnic national origin (including shared ancestry and/or ethnic characteristics), sex, disability, military status (including veteran status), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, pregnancy status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.”