George Mason President Gregory Washington says he won’t quit amid Trump DEI probes – The Washington Post
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Higher Education
Conservatives want him fired. This president says he’s not going anywhere.
George Mason President Gregory Washington lacks Harvard’s resources and is facing calls for his ouster amid four Trump probes. He says he won’t quit.
Gregory N. Washington is the president of George Mason University. (Maxine Wallace / The Washington Post)
September 5, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDT, Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EDTa, 15 min
By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Karina Elwood
Most presidents of universities targeted by the Trump administration have kept their heads down. Not Gregory Washington.
When the Trump administration announced the first of four civil rights probes into George Mason University in July, the president of Virginia’s largest four-year public university sent a campuswide letter defending the school’s efforts to combat antisemitism. He would later send similar letters about its diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
An engineer by training, Washington is a planner by nature. When he became George Mason’s first Black president — the latest of many barriers he has broken — he vowed to faculty to overcommunicate. So he couldn’t stay silent when the allegations of civil rights violations came.
“I don’t run from the hard issues,” Washington said in an interview. “I run to them. I don’t ask people to agree with me, just to enter a dialogue with me.”
In interviews, 17 current and former colleagues of Washington, including deans, professors, vice presidents and four past board chairs, described the 59-year-old as methodical, intensely prepared, principled and at times aggressive. Two criticized him for prioritizing diversity too much, alleging that he pushed faculty to consider race in hiring.
Washington says his vision is shaped by his experience as a Black man in a field where he rarely saw others who looked like him, especially as he rose in the ranks of academia, and he has since supported policies aimed at expanding access. “Talent is distributed evenly,” he said, “but opportunity is not.”
He has become one of few public university presidents to openly stand up to the Trump administration, even as those at elite schools resign.
That approach is now being tested.
As part of the Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle DEI, which has focused largely on higher-profile schools such as Harvard,the Education Department recently found that George Mason illegally considered race in hiring and promotions, a charge Washington denies.
Agency officials said Washington must publicly apologize, acknowledge that his policies were discriminatory and revise any DEI programs as part of a proposal to resolve the findings.
Washington, through his lawyer, has refused. The board of visitors — run by appointees of Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) — recentlysaid its attorneys and Washington’s lawyer would meet with the Trump administration. Some fear that the body could use the probes as a pretext to fire the George Mason leader. On Wednesday, Washington met with a House committee that alleged he had overseen a “pervasive culture of intolerance” because of the school’s hiring practices and DEI efforts.
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