University Confronted About Illegal Hiring on Racial Lines in Leaked Audio

A psychology professor has warned that hiring based on race alone was illegal, even as the University of Washington (UW) psychology department was downgrading white and Asian candidates, an audio recording obtained by Newsweek has shown.

The university later banned the faculty from hiring tenure-track employees for two years after finding major discrimination in hiring practices.

In an audio recording of a meeting on March 16, 2023, psychology professor Ione Fine objected to the hiring process in which the first- and second-ranked candidates, who were white and Asian American, respectively, got overlooked in favor of the third-ranked hopeful, who was Black.

For that to be achieved, a new "threshold" system was introduced in which any candidate could be chosen once they reached a certain level, circumventing the previous practice of hiring the highest-ranking candidate.

In 1998, Washington state passed a referendum banning race-based hiring in universities, which appears to have been ignored by the psychology department.

At the meeting, Fine objected to staff only having a 15-minute meeting to approve the decision of the selection committee.

"I feel like this idea that we are just deciding on candidates above threshold is a huge change in what we are looking at as a department and I think it should be something that we discuss as a faculty, not something that is decided by the planning committee," Fine told the meeting.

She added: "I personally am in favor of affirmative action, but we are legally not allowed to do it. I actually think we do owe the taxpayers who pay our salaries—the fact that it is illegal and has been democratically decided to be illegal by the taxpayers."

"So can you explain how we are respecting taxpayers? How are we not doing a round around on what we are legally supposed to do?" she asked.

In response, a member of the selection committee denied that they were hiring based on race alone.

"This is not kind of like we are giving someone a position because of their identity. We have three extremely qualified candidates and we are making a strategic offer based on what the department has deemed the most important[...]so that is not at all what is happening," the committee member told Fine.

Members of the department involved in the selection process denied that the selection criteria that were being used were illegal. At the meeting, they cited guidance from a senior college administrator, who was advising the faculty on hiring policy. One selection committee member told Fine they took the question to a senior college administrator and he made it "very clear that we are not in a situation where we're being in any way illegal."

Fine's objections came one month before the Black candidate was hired after some Diversity Advisory Committee members urged that she be hired over the white candidate, who was then downgraded from first to third in the rankings.

Newsweek previously reported the university's comment that "an internal whistleblower" exposed the discrimination. We can now reveal that the internal whistleblower was Fine, who specializes in the psychology of blindness and other areas of research.

An internal report discovered the discrimination in hiring procedures.

Other violations included the absence of white staff from meetings with job candidates, deleting a passage from a hiring report to hide discrimination, and discussing ways to "think our way around" a Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action in colleges.

A UW spokeswoman told Newsweek on January 3 that the case was exposed when "the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, responding to an internal whistleblower, requested an internal review of this process by what was then called UCIRO (University Complaints, Investigation and Resolution Office) and is now the Civil Rights Investigation Office."

The UW report found that when five finalists for a tenure-track assistant professor position were selected in January 2023, they were due to be interviewed by the Women Faculty and Faculty of Color groups so they could assess the general atmosphere of the faculty.

The report said a member of the Faculty of Color did not want any white women at the meeting and complained that the interviews were "awkward" when there was a white candidate. The names of everyone involved are redacted from the UW report.

A University of Washington spokesperson told Newsweek that the March 16 meeting was included in the university's review of this hiring process.

"As noted in our October 31 news release, the outcome of that review was placing a 2-year ban on hiring in the psychology department, retraining of the department's faculty on hiring processes, and updating institutional hiring policies and guidance to specifically address areas where efforts to address bias may lead to violations of laws or policy," the spokesperson said.

Asked about an administrator's role in advising the psychology department selection committee, he said that the situation "has revealed a disconnect between university guidance and the way this hiring committee interpreted what was and was not appropriate."

"That is precisely why one of the outcomes was the University initiating an update to its institutional hiring policies and guidance to specifically address areas where efforts to address bias may lead to violations of laws or policy," he said.

Update 23/01/24 06:08 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include a statement from the University of Washington

Update 01/24/24 2:46 p.m. ET: This article was updated to add additional detail from the March 16 meeting about the role of the University administration in the hiring process and to add an additional response from the University.