PRINCETON, New Jersey (LifeSiteNews) — Princeton University hiring staff were internally advised to disregard negative references for minority candidates, a City Journal investigation recently revealed.

After reviewing “over a dozen internal documents” and conducting interviews with six employees, the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe concluded that Princeton University “flagrantly violated Civil Rights Act principles in the name of ‘social justice.’”

Most notably, a 2021 internal Princeton report on faculty hiring best practices “advised search committees to discount negative references for minority candidates and to ensure that every shortlist included at least ‘two women and/or two underrepresented minority candidates,’” the investigators shared.

As one professor who wished to remain anonymous pointed out, the university had rejected merit-based hiring in favor of race- and sex-based hiring, which was required to meet Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s stated goal of increasing “by 50 percent the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty members from underrepresented groups over the next five years.” Professors explained these “groups” refer to both women and racial minorities.

As in other fields, such diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices have considerable implications for the quality of Princeton’s faculty, especially if negative references for minority candidates are being ignored. The hiring of professors or student advisors who would otherwise be disqualified because of poor job performance would have especially weighty consequences. 

These DEI-based hiring practices call into question the quality of education of what is considered the most “prestigious” university in America. Its fruits of late have included the decadent, morally and aesthetically bankrupt musical “To All the Babies I’ve Killed Before: A Love/Hate Letter to Storytelling.”

The play’s program notes clearly proclaim woke, DEI values, explaining the story “aims to investigate the challenges of being heard and cultivating self-empowerment as a queer, cognitively disabled (ADHD) woman in artistic spaces that traditionally center archaic, western, patriarchal narratives grounded in firm structures of storytelling and comedy.” 

The investigators also pointed to a program discontinued in 2024 which funded the hiring of “underrepresented” candidates, which effectively “created financial incentives to prioritize hiring racial minorities” and women.

One Princeton infographic showed that no less than 40 academic and administrative departments have DEI committees aimed at changing the university’s demographics. As its first annual diversity report stated, “Every administrative and academic leader is being held accountable for demographic evolution.”

Faculty members translated “demographic evolution” to mean “racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring,” noted Rufo and Thorpe.

“The implicit message from Eisgruber and the administration: don’t hire white men unless absolutely necessary,” the investigators wrote.

Remarkably, Eisgruber’s top DEI staffer, Michele Minter, admitted in a 2022 speech to the Princeton Mercer Regional Chamber of Commerce that the university is not colorblind, stating, “We have to resist the temptation to fall back into the idea that … not seeing difference should be our goal.” She nevertheless “compared today’s anti-DEI activists with the segregationists of the 1960s,” said Rufo and Thorpe.

“But, like Eisgruber, she has it backward. The only racial segregation at Princeton today is driven by the DEI bureaucracy, which allocates programs, funding, and opportunities to certain racial groups while excluding others,” remarked the investigators.

Rufo and Thorpe believe Princeton may not have only violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act, but potentially also the legal requirements of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws racial discrimination in hiring with a “few narrow exceptions.”

“The argument has to be made that this is really about unlawful behavior and not about anything else,” said one Princeton employee.