Awash in Bias, ACEJMC Uni Accreditors Fail “Nonpartisan” Fact-Check

The ACEJMC university accreditation body for journalism, advertising, and PR is so compromised that a U.S. Department of Justice investigation is overdue to fix it.

Reversals of course range from DEI to gender issues to global warming to freedom of speech to so-called “fact checking.” Social media corporate CEO about-faces (groveling?) have been fascinating to behold. 

To that point, here’s an item that received no mention at all in mainstream news media last month…

On December 6, the online newsroom of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) – which functions as an “accreditor of accreditors” and oversees most accrediting entities for colleges and universities nationwide — posted this (see also below), with a “Who… ME?” posture of faux innocence on the partisanship question:

You see, there’s this thing.

It’s called The Internet.

Undeleted items posted purposely in the public domain by full-on culprits of partisan hostilities these past years ARE STILL THERE. 

Of course, deleting one’s entire historical Twitter (now X) account is all the rage these days on the political left… and I suppose it’s no wonder why, given fears by many, of being held accountable.

Take the ACEJMC, for instance.  

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications answers to the CHEA oversight body as the accreditor over mass communication university programs nationwide (including journalism, advertising, and my own 30-year career field of public relations).

The ACEJMC’s current president, Del Galloway, posted this appalling item on X (then Twitter) just over four years ago, mocking President Trump when President Biden was elected, and warning President Trump — replete with emojis — “Don’t drop the soap”… a crude reference to male-on-male prison sexual violence:

This post was hardly the first time Mr. Galloway made his partisan views abundantly clear while serving on the ACEJMC (my evidence file is available to investigators).

The past seven years or so have not been pleasant for me, however, in my encounters with Mr. Galloway, including his history of interjecting bias – both disclosed and undisclosed – into institutional policy decisions.

My first negative run-in with Mr. Galloway occurred when I proposed ethics-reform PRSA bylaw amendments in 2018 — one of which would have required PRSA itself to adopt a “nonpartisan” operational and spokesmanship mandate.

I was shocked when Mr. Galloway publicly spurred and rejected my proposals — even posting online in the MyPRSA intranet community for all then-some 20,000 PRSA members to see, casting unfair and misdirected aspersions not only on my ideas but also implied insults to my character.

All the while, Mr. Galloway failed to disclose to PRSA members at that time that his own ethics-embattled employer, Wells Fargo, was then vying for retention of PRSA’s for-profit investment services portfolio management contract, which Mr. Galloway himself was involved in representing on behalf of the Bank to PRSA’s Board, as documented in prior Board minutes. Various situational factors made Mr. Galloway’s actions and communication choices a matter of disturbing conflict-of-interest, which I documented.

When I asked Mr. Galloway in a civil manner via e-mail to have a conversation with me in 2018 about his publicly stated rejection of my ethics-reform proposals, he responded via his Wells Fargo e-mail with sexist tropes, calling me “shrill” and “mean-spirited”:

Refusing dialogue with a colleague — and insulting them in the process — is not what I would call PR best-practice.

Today — some seven years later — well-documented propensities by Mr. Galloway to insult, degrade, bully, and seek to intimidate (all of which have been my personal experiences with Mr. Galloway since 2018) are certainly not good, since Mr. Galloway is empowered to render pass / fail grades to U.S. institutions of higher learning.

After all, universities leverage accreditation as a “good housekeeping seal of approval,” so to speak, for all kinds of competitive interests. The ACEJMC itself talks of this “seal of approval” in its own marketing material.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in university investment (largely in faculty / staff time, often at taxpayer expense for state-funded universities) usually go into each school’s accreditation-readiness and site-review processes.

It’s a herculean effort for universities to undertake. Some respected schools — such as the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico (see video clip below) — have bid adios to ACEJMC accreditation, citing various factors.

I imagine, however, that millions of dollars in competitive spoils can be in the offing as a consequence of either winning (re)accreditation or losing it.

Simply put, the stakes are high. If they weren’t, then university administrators wouldn’t give a care. But they are. So they do. As such, it should not be unreasonable to expect ACEJMC officials to be professional, credible, fair-minded, balanced, and nonpartisan in their approach.

Even if we set aside the ACEJMC president’s partisan displays on social media, it’s always bad form to project dark-humor fantasies publicly about anyone being raped (“Don’t drop the soap”). Might we all at least agree to that much decency, regardless of political affiliations?

Otherwise, these kinds of outrageous, tasteless, and offensive public remarks – including those promoting or making light of obscene violence (as if universities need more of that these days) – can only be perceived as completely passing muster at the ACEJMC and CHEA.

For her part, it appears the current ACEJMC staff executive director, Patricia Thompson, retweeted in 2016 on her own feed a fake TIME magazine cover depicting Mr. Trump in prison garb, before Mr. Trump was even inaugurated the first time.

This retweet was about 18 months prior to her apparently landing her ACEJMC executive director job — which means that either her social media feed was not vetted by the ACEJMC search committee for her position, or, it was indeed vetted and these types of tweets / retweets were deemed “A-Okay!“.

While the argument invariably will be made that partisan political advocacy on one’s personal social media feed is within any individual’s rights to post, the manner, tone, and degree of posts must nevertheless factor into specific leaders’ thinking and how they may be trying to apply pressure on stakeholders to mimic or think like them, when they hold positions of power over large institutions.

What message is this obvious political bent supposed to signal to universities under these people’s ACEJMC thumb? It seems obvious to me:

Kowtow to our partisan world view… or else!

It appears the ACEJMC body offers practically no ideological diversity politically whatsoever within its council membership. If it does, it seems those council members of conservative viewpoints are too intimidated to speak up, in protesting obvious issues documented here, to the extent that ACEJMC leaders would clean up their act.

If CHEA has ever reprimanded the ACEJMC for these kinds of free-wheeling social media choices on the so-called “We’re not partisan!” front, then I’d like to see the documentation.

We should look at the fairly recent case of the ACEJMC’s downgrade of accreditation to the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism.

On August 23, 2021 — about two months prior to the scheduled October 2021 ACEJMC review team site visit at UNC-Chapel Hill — the ACEJMC received an urgent query from the assistant to the UNC’s then-dean of the Hussman School. According to publicly discoverable e-mail, the UNC assistant expressed concern about providing certain demographic information about employees, as was being demanded by the ACEJMC on DEI grounds.

She stated she planned to “get guidance” from the Hussman School’s HR director.

The ACEJMC executive director replied, however, “We’ve never had any school that didn’t give us the data or information.”

Clearly, with that reply, UNC’s Hussman School essentially was warned not to start its accreditation process off on the wrong foot by being perceived as uncooperative or obstructionist. It didn’t seem to matter to the ACEJMC if it was asking a UNC employee, who was trying to be helpful in the process, to break University policy.

This above exchange would be followed by many, many others, via publicly discoverable e-mail, painting a broad portrait of ACEJMC pressures applied upon UNC, in what would evolve as a “conviction in search of evidence” sham review of the UNC Hussman School’s ACEJMC “diversity” standard compliance.

It was a big, big deal in Academia World, particularly given UNC-Chapel Hill’s enormously positive, historical reputation as a journalism school powerhouse in particular.

UNC is a perennial Hearst Prize winner, so the Hussman School in fact is among the journalistic-education best of the best in the nation – and has been so, for years and years and years.

But reputations for excellence can be crushed in an instant, when the egregiously biased or ill-motivated are holding the puppet strings.

This ACEJMC Accrediting Committee Meeting documentation of minutes from March 2022 confirm that, in their own deliberations, officials acknowledged UNC’s Hussman School to be EXCELLENT. The “latent anger” and “strong emotions” about a singular personnel decision essentially drove a course-reversal, only later.

One notable aspect of the timing of the official notification letter dated May 24, 2022, from the ACEJMC to UNC….

Someone let the word out to news media weeks before May 24, 2022, that UNC’s accreditation had been downgraded, before UNC was allowed detailed information by the ACEJMC itself, according to the e-mail record.

As a result, UNC was getting blasted with media queries and published stories in early May 2022, with reporters demanding to know from Hussman School officials what UNC had done wrong and how they would fix their “diversity” problems. But detailed information about the “verdict” against UNC apparently was being purposely withheld by ACEJMC officials, according to chronological e-mail documentation (all my attempts in Q4 2024 to contact the ACEJMC were ignored by multiple officials).

E-mails show that, for weeks, UNC administrators were unable to view and assess the detailed reasons for the accreditation downgrade for themselves.

The ACEJMC’s mismanagement of their own information flows made UNC appear (falsely) not only as DEI “failures” (code for “racist”), but also operationally inept and clueless to reporters, alumni, donors, and all kinds of stakeholders, who were blowing up UNC’s phones and e-mail boxes for the first three weeks of May 2022, demanding answers that UNC was apparently hamstrung by the ACEJMC from being able to give.

According to publicly discovered e-mails, on April 29, 2022 — the date of the ACEJMC’s vote to downgrade UNC –a UNC official privy to the vote taken that day had flagged the ACEJMC’s executive director on this issue, well-before the media calls even started.

UNC needed the ACEJMC letter as soon as possible to pinpoint why precisely this downgrade was being imposed, because UNC anticipated word getting out to media about the accreditation downgrade, and that there would be a negative press-coverage reaction. These concerns were plainly stated.

ACEJMC Executive Director Patricia Thompson promised the inquiring UNC official that UNC would receive a reply from the ACEJMC’s then-president, Peter Bhatia: “Peter will answer you soon,” implying that any delays would be because of the weather.

On May 1, the UNC official e-mailed again… with urgency:

She even cited that ACEJMC then-president Peter Bhatia “knows the reporter” on a damaging MSN story posted online (which, of course, begs the question — meriting investigation — of whether this story or others were purposely pitched / pre-cued for news media by someone with media-outreach / PR skills who wanted to see UNC’s Hussman School harmed reputationally as much as possible, with as much public criticism as possible).

All appearances of this scenario reek of potential ill-intent.

In practical terms, if Mr. Bhatia had time to chit-chat with media and be “quoted” by reporters on the sensationalistic UNC downgrade headline, then why couldn’t he be bothered to get the final ACEJMC letter of “deficiencies” as owed to UNC dispatched sooner, so that UNC officials at least could speak with authority to these same reporters themselves, about why ACEJMC was downgrading UNC and what UNC planned to do next?

On May 6, 2022, yet again, UNC officials were practically begging the ACEJMC’s executive director, Ms. Thompson, to send to them the official notification letter so that they would know what the heck was going on “as media coverage mounts,” relative to why they were being downgraded or what they were supposed to improve upon.

Ms. Thompson, however, decided to continue leaving them twisting in the wind — or, perhaps she was mandated to do so by her board / president (again, these types of valid questions merit an independent investigation).

She opined to UNC about “right-wing blogs,” instead of providing the requested letter that was owed (and, by then, was way overdue) to UNC.

On May 9, Ms. Thompson again complained to a colleague of “some right-wing blogger” on grounds of racism, that “readers” “see a black female face and incorrectly assume I orchestrated the whole thing…”

Meanwhile, UNC remained without its letter.

This foot-dragging behavior by ACEJMC officials appears to have been purposeful (an open question, meriting investigation).

For all of Ms. Thompson’s complaints about being stressed in her job (many e-mails document her personal complaints about receiving complaints herself), one must ask if there was an intent by the ACEJMC to inflict psychological / emotional abuse on UNC faculty and administration, by leaving them purposely uninformed and twisting in the wind for such an extended time, while the ACEJMC knew full-well that UNC personnel were under intense media scrutiny and public attack due to the (leaked?) ACEJMC accreditation decision.

When documentation finally did arrive to UNC, it became clear the UNC’s accreditation downgrade by ACEJMC was completely on the basis of alleged DEI-failure allegations, mostly pertaining to one, single issue / person. UNC’s Hussman School passed other ACEJMC standards, with flying colors, on substantive areas of academic performance and positive student outcomes — but none of those relevant facts mattered to ACEJMC officials.

The downgrade was focused almost solely on the fact that UNC university-level Administration opted not to grant tenure in 2021 to then-UNC journalism faculty member Nikole Hannah-Jones (referred to as “NHJ” in some of Ms. Thompson’s and other ACEJMC e-mails).

The 1619 Project is a rendition of early U.S. history that, when published in 2019, was widely panned for including factual errors of actual history (which may have factored into the tenure decision not in Ms. Hannah-Jones’ favor), with esteemed journalists and history analysts calling it out for a range of inaccuracies as well as its present-day partisan political lens.

A few examples of the push-back to the 1619 Project even by professionals / scholars of color:

In addition, UNC-Chapel Hill alumnus, journalist, and member of the John Locke Foundation, Mitch Kokai, posted online what the National Review wrote of The 1619 Project, that: “…while the project contains some useful perspective on the history of slavery, segregation, and racism in America, it is wrapped in a highly tendentious ideological framework that ranges from rank Democratic partisanship to Marxist economic and political theory.

As such, this single staff-tenure issue involving one solitary personnel decision — that of Ms. Hannah-Jones — utterly dominated Mr. Galloway’s and his team’s site-review rebuke to UNC’s Hussman School, allegedly on the ACEJMC’s so-called “diversity and inclusion” standard.

The tenure decision about Ms. Hannah-Jones transpired at the University level; yet it was the Hussman School that shouldered the ACEJMC’s partisan wrath.

Believe me – I’ve read the ACEJMC’s UNC site-review report. (You can, too!)

The name “Nikole Hannah-Jones” was mentioned in the ACEJMC’s UNC Hussman School site review report 25 times.

Such a fixation on only one staff person seems more than a bit excessive as a core reason for an entire school’s accreditation downgrade.

UNC was more than compliant on all kinds of DEI policies / areas (by the ACEJMC’s own admission in its report), but this one personnel decision involving Ms. Hannah-Jones somehow meant — as evidenced by ACEJMC actions — that the full UNC program needed to be punished.

Harshly. And publicly.

Here’s video of a resulting local North Carolina news story, alongside a smattering of social media headlines as well:

https://www.wral.com/video/unc-journalism-school-accreditation-gets-downgraded/20262193

ACEJMC President Del Galloway had already tweeted on May 21, 2021 — five months prior to his October 2021 ACEJMC site visit to North Carolina — a public rebuke of UNC, because of its Hannah-Jones tenure decision:

His May 21, 2021, “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.” public comment alone should have rendered Mr. Galloway far too biased and predisposed to seek UNC failing in its accreditation efforts, to his having been qualified to sit on the voting site review team for UNC, five months later.

But did Mr. Galloway recuse himself from the UNC site team, after knowingly posting his highly prejudicial and compromised tweet?

Publicly discovered e-mail shows he readily volunteered for the UNC site-review job only about a month after his prejudicial, anti-UNC tweet.

This policy requires ACEJMC members – in no uncertain terms – to hold themselves accountable by not interjecting their preconceived notions and pre-judgments onto their accreditation work, which can harm unfairly very good and solid academic programs.

Naturally, UNC received massive, reputation-damaging publicity in the wake of the ACEJMC yanking away full re-accreditation, thanks at least in part to Mr. Galloway’s politically biased handiwork.

Knowing his prior track record and modus operandi as well as I do, I imagine this harm to UNC gave Mr. Galloway – who doesn’t hold a Ph.D. himself but appears to me to enjoy lording over others who do – immense partisan satisfaction, particularly given that UNC’s journalism school had just recently been re-named for publisher Walter Hussman, a $25 million donor to the school.

It appears this precise outcome potentially was intended, judging from all the legally obtained e-mails, including widespread media references that Mr. Hussman is a political conservative or moderate-conservative.

By way of his social media history, it appears Mr. Galloway enjoys these types of contrived exercises – and being a ringleader among others of like mind.

From my personal experience over years, it seems to matter not to Mr. Galloway when abuses of power unjustifiably harm good, high-quality, and even award-winning colleagues and their institutions, as long as he’s within the “inner circle” helping implement it, to whatever his desired ends may be. I’ve directly experienced this conduct from Mr. Galloway, in PRSA. So there’s a pattern here.

The ACEJMC should be investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for its personnel spreading via e-mail a vast amount of additional and obviously prejudicial anti-UNC commentary, in favor of Ms. Hannah-Jones and in rebuke of UNC Hussman School, prior to and following the ACEJMC’s October 2021 site visit by Mr. Galloway, et al.

My evidence file of other publicly discovered e-mails is thick.

For example, on May 19, 2021, ACEJMC Executive Director Patricia Thompson literally wrote to a colleague, saying, “I‘m a huge NHJ (Nikole Hannah-Jones) fan and I’m outraged this is happening…”

And how is this comment by Ms. Thompson defensible, when she doth protest too much in other e-mails as to being unfairly judged by the “right wing” as biased, simply due to “a black female face” (her words, from her aforementioned May 9, 2022 e-mail, sent one year after this one):

To that point, the following year, in May 2022, Ms. Thompson responded to another colleague (who noted he had received a complaint about the ACEJMC’s downgrade of UNC), essentially saying those “complaining about the UNC decision” “are angry partly because they think we were out for vengeance because we support NHJ…”

Well.

Madame, if the shoe fits...

The “we support NHJ” remark seems — yet again — to confirm baked-in bias to UNC’s unfair detriment, given that all kinds of factors to which the ACEJMC was not privy nor had any right to be privy could have factored into a personnel / HR decision specific to one person.

I also think the ACEJMC should be investigated for registering under Mr. Galloway’s first year of leadership as president a sudden, odd $100,000 net loss on revenues of only just over $300K.

When I sent repeated e-mails to the ACEJMC from October through December 2024 to inquire about documented financial losses (and other issues), my e-mails were ignored by ACEJMC staff and certain board members alike (excerpt below). It’s now past mid-January 2025, and I’ve still never even received an acknowledgement of my valid inquiries:

This lack of response seems more than merely unprofessional.

Plus, this behavior is precisely the modus operandi of PRSA, which has worked extensively in collusion with Mr. Galloway and other PRSA-appointed ACEJMC members.

The ever-left-leaning and partisan PRSA – which appointed Mr. Galloway in the first place to the ACEJMC – should also be investigated, due to long-unaddressed ethics, financial, and legal-noncompliance issues, many of which involve either directly or indirectly not only Mr. Galloway but also other current and past PRSA appointees to the ACEJMC:

Looking closer to home for me in Tennessee, I’m keen to learn what on earth Mr. Galloway himself was referencing in his June 2024 letter to my own alma mater at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

In this letter to UT President Randy Boyd, Mr. Galloway gave cryptic mention of the ACEJMC having “voted to rescind its May 3 action” tied to a prior vote or mandate about something pertaining to UT’s PR program (of which Mr. Galloway is well-aware that I’m an alumna).

What was that about?

And why?

Was Mr. Galloway holding some threat of an embarrassing ACEJMC public rebuke over UT’s head, such as what had been rendered, not long before, upon UNC’s Hussman School?

I’ve asked questions of the ACEJMC, but they won’t even acknowledge my e-mails (plural). It’s only another key question that deserves investigation.

Mr. Galloway’s ACEJMC also called out my alma mater at UT as “NON-COMPLIANT” in one area of its February 2024 accreditation site-visit assessment – just as UNC was called out only in one area as such (the UT call-out wasn’t in the DEI category, though).

In fact, in its write-up for UT, the ACEJMC made it look like UT’s Journalism & Electronic Media (JEM) School barely even tried to demonstrate compliance with standards, which, in my view, is a cockamamie proposition, given my knowledge of the program and strong due-diligence by its faculty and administrative personnel.

If UT-CCI Dean Joe Mazer was not planning to ensure that UT’s ACEJMC process was undertaken seriously by his team who report to him, then why did Dean Mazer fly up to Chicago 11 months in advance to attend a committee meeting where Mr. Galloway was present, prior to the ACEJMC’s 2024 accreditation site visit to Knoxville? (See Dean Mazer’s tweet, with photo, documenting the occasion)

It doesn’t make sense.

And then there’s this head-scratcher:

Somehow, both UT and UNC had a “NON-COMPLIANCE” assessment in a specific area, but only UNC had the book thrown at them with an accreditation downgrade, whereas UT was spared that outcome.

So why is that?

Why the different outcomes?

This seems a matter for investigation by the Tennessee State Attorney General, Jonathan Skrmetti. I hope AG Skrmetti might take a look at this. There’s a heck of a lot of “there” there, including this:

While he’s not busy running around scaring the bejeezus out of mass-comm collegiate administrators across all of Christendom, it seems Mr. Galloway enjoys almost nothing more than fanning flames of racial shame + moral superiority, as he often does online.

Apparently, Mr. Galloway may be ignorant of Tennessee law, on that matter.

Mr. Galloway’s own social media commenting — like the item below that he posted within the past year on LinkedIn — reflects the kinds of content, spirit and intent that run afoul of Tennessee’s Higher Education Freedom of Expression and Transparency Act when such obvious sex- or race-baiting “stereotyping” / “scapegoating” is imposed on taxpayer-funded educational systems to indoctrinate, intimidate and manipulate students.

By law, the statute bars Tennessee taxpayer-funded universities from teaching and imposing upon students any form of wholesale “stereotyping” or “scapegoating” of entire groups of people by race, ethnicity, gender, or other demographic identifiers in unlawful ways for the express purpose of fomenting divisive harm, under false and contrived auspices of “education.”

The statute is not without its critics, but I have to say… this bill became law in Tennessee — alongside multiple other states that have passed similar statutes — for the very reason of the divisive “stereotyping” and “scapegoating” rhetoric, running rampant in higher ed, as parroted by the ACEJMC’s Mr. Galloway.

On a PR Podcast some years ago, Mr. Galloway claimed credit for pressuring his PR Department colleagues at Wells Fargo to interject the company’s fairly rotten brand name into the George Floyd tragedy in 2020.

Mr. Galloway alluded that his “trusted adviser” status and “gravitas” (his words describing himself) within Wells Fargo led him to hold his own “young folk” co-workers’ feet to the fire (under their own protest, apparently), in conflating Wells Fargo with the tragedy through public / press statements, to score DEI points.

The ego, the bullying, the misnomers, the strange hypocrisies (What’s Mr. Galloway’s problem with Asian people?)… it’s all on full display here, by the person who is the ACEJMC president, setting the agenda:

Going back to the CHEA statement claiming that wildly partisan-led accrediting bodies are somehow “nonpartisan,” the evidence I’ve presented here overwhelmingly indicts the ACEJMC and its leadership.

This absurdity is so rife within academia — and it’s been going on increasingly, for so long — that CHEA and similar oversight authorities appear completely blasé and complicit with it. It’s classic frog-boiled-in-water syndrome.

But now, with a new U.S. presidential administration in place, CHEA appears to be trying to rewrite history by claiming a preemptive nothing-to-see-here message – even though all this stuff remains out in front of God and everybody in the full public domain.

A mass-comms and journalism accrediting council should know far better than anyone the long memory of that thing called The Internet.

I don’t expect any organization or person to be perfect. I’m certainly not.

But there is a particular responsibility we have, when we hold positions of power that can unduly harm people who don’t deserve harm. Modeling worst-practice should not be the ACEJMC rubric, yet here we sit, confronted with this degree of gaffes and injustices.

If the ACEJMC and CHEA brigades are simply too ignorant (or arrogant) to realize how compromised they’ve made themselves, then why are they authorized to render judgmental and reputational harm on everyone else, at the expense of educational quality for our nation’s university students and our nation’s future journalism, public relations, and advertising professionals?

At this point, in the wake of its disastrous UNC process-mismanagement, I can only imagine the ACEJMC likely has reduced itself to a circular firing squad (a job posting for Ms. Thompson’s position has been online for months).

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