(The Lion) — Several public universities rejected applicant pools for faculty positions if they included too many white scholars, according to a new report.

John Sailer, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, uncovered these practices in a report titled “How DEI Bureaucrats Control University Hiring.”

His findings cover the University of Texas at Austin, Cornell, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ohio State University between 2001 and 2023.

The documents “illustrate the lengths at which universities will go to obfuscate their DEI-hiring practices” and how “a lot of these policies are confusing by design,” Sailer told the College Fix.

Administrators received demographic breakdowns of applicants before proceeding with faculty searches, records show. If the pool wasn’t deemed sufficiently diverse, the search could be delayed, redirected or canceled altogether.

At the University of Texas at Austin, art history professor Carma Gorman, who served as a “diversity advocate” on a search committee, emailed a dean asking whether the demographics of the applicant pool “pass muster.” She noted 21% of applicants were from racial minority groups.

“If 20 of the 23 URM applicants are dropped in the early cut, then things don’t look good anymore,” responded John Yancey, associate dean of diversity in the College of Fine Arts.

Gorman’s written plan included monitoring diversity at every stage of the process, including the final list.

“Is it diverse enough? If not, rethink the pool,” she wrote.

At Ohio State, Dean Susan Olesik told search committees, “If the slate of candidates that you bring forward are not diverse, I will ask you to simply keep searching.”

Such policies were tied to federal grant incentives, Sailer said.

“[Universities] applied to federal grants that gave them a lot of money – these are million-dollar grants – designed to promote diversity,” he said.

One university argued its practices followed the law at the time.

“When it was recorded in 2022, Executive Order 11246 was in effect and federal law required federal contractors, like Ohio State, to make efforts to recruit a diverse pool of candidates,” Ohio State spokesperson Benjamin Johnson told the College Fix.

Executive Order 11246, issued in 1965, required federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure diverse applicant pools. Although intended to prevent discrimination, it was often used to justify race-conscious hiring practices.

President Trump revoked this order this year through Executive Order 14173, which bans racial discrimination in hiring by federal contractors.

Sailer believes people will file litigation against these universities.

“The practice is dangerously close to being illegal, if not just outright illegal, depending on who you talk to,” he said.