Orange Men Bad: UF / Syracuse PRSA Cartel Traded Ethics for Awards

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) cartel — composed of and ring-led largely by PRSA Past Presidents / Chairs with University of Florida and Syracuse University loyalties (a mix of alumni status and/or employment status) — has been exposed and discussed extensively in these recent and excessively well-documented blog posts:

ACCESS TO ALL POSTS, HERE: https://www.marybethwest.com/news/

These above exposés should further be absorbed in the context of larger U.S. domestic and international PR industry antitrust misconduct / goings-on…

… and with it further noted that several members of the PRSA Past Presidents Council of previous PRSA National Chairs (designated in PRSA Bylaws and given “key person” status / clout from a liability standpoint) have prior, direct employment connections with PR / ad agency mega-conglomerate, Omnicom — a long time “PR” services contractor to (and profit-winner from) certain foreign governments considered highly adversarial to U.S. national security interests.

When we consider the PRSA cartel house of cards and its impact on the Disinformation Landscape, those of us in the PR industry who devoted decades of our lives in service to the PRSA association as good-faith volunteers are forced to beg one question:

WHY?

Why this duplicity, illegal activity, and vile assaults by cartel members upon the PRSA Code of Ethics, not to mention exceptionally risky violations of antitrust laws, which carry hefty fines and even prison time for convicted violators?

I believe my above-mentioned blog posts truly help lend clarity and light to that simple “Why?” question, although, admittedly, there are no simple answers, given the complex web of corruption PRSA’s culprits of misconduct have sewn for themselves.

A lot of it hinges, I’m sure, on the age-old motivators of GREED:

Greed for power.

Greed for position.

Greed for self-publicity / ego-boosting as a pronounced “hero” of one’s industry (no matter how bitterly false the reality).

Greed for money (and yes, when federal investigators start delving into this, that 20-years-overdue FORENSIC ACCOUNTING AUDIT that should have been done of PRSA and PRSA Foundation financials will most certainly yield some stop-traffic revelations, I’m sure).

Like obvious self-dealing, when a Syracuse University PRSA Past Chair was on the PRSA Foundation — and Syracuse started getting consideration for plumb Foundation grants / projects:

Or, like when two guys whom I only found out years later are Syracuse University grads in PRSA (who just happened also to be the 1) PRSA Foundation President and the 2) PRSA CFO) scolded me for asking too many PRSA / PRSA Foundation financial-discrepancy questions, and told me they no longer would answer questions, in a very hostile, accusatory, and bullying / misogynistic fashion:

Just a few examples of hundreds of issues!

One element of the PRSA fraud at hand is, of course, the industrial-scale manipulation of PR academia by PRSA cartel ringleaders, to score ill-gotten legitimacy to PRSA culprits.

To that point, let’s all be crystal-clear, that the lynchpin this past decade in that piece of the scandal are, without question, the University of Florida and Syracuse University brigades of the PRSA cartel.

Disclaimer: Only certain people are PRSA cartel members. Many people affiliated with UF and Syracuse are good, honest people, who would be appalled to have known the content and scale of ethics violations going on in PRSA, had the misconduct not been so well-concealed and hidden under PRSA’s rug by certain Syracuse / Gator devotees.

In 2018, the Wells Fargo “fake accounts” scandal / ethics crisis bore down on PRSA directly, given that two Past Chairs of PRSA (both University of Florida alumni: Del Galloway and Rosanna Fiske) were employed in Wells Fargo’s so-called “PR Department,” while simultaneously, Wells Fargo collected for-profit fees from PRSA, Inc., to “manage” PRSA’s then-sizable investment portfolio.

2018 PRSA National Chair Tony D’Angelo (employed then and now at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School) knew all about Wells Fargo’s PRSA contract and Del Galloway’s own specific involvement in it.

After all, D’Angelo was marked as “Present” at the 2017 PRSA Board meeting when Galloway helped present the Wells Fargo investment portfolio review to the entire PRSA Board.

Yet how sad, that D’Angelo later lied to news media and the full PRSA membership about it.

In summer 2018, D’Angelo claimed falsely that not even Galloway had any role whatsoever in Wells Fargo’s PRSA contracting relationship.

D’Angelo even threatened in a PRWeek trade story to have PRSA sue me, if I (essentially) kept telling the truth about his and Galloway’s PRSA / Wells Fargo contracting and non-disclosures.

Why the lies? What was being covered up?

Was Galloway earning big PRSA-account commissions, as Wells Fargo was excessively well-known to deal in, in the bank’s toxic sales culture?

D’Angelo denied it, but given his other blatant falsehoods in even denying Galloway was involved at all in Wells Fargo’s for-profit business with PRSA, D’Angelo’s claims rang 100% hollow.

Another kicker: PRSA held a PRSA National Board meeting in April 2018 at Syracuse, where it was blatantly reported that Wells Fargo had failed to answer PRSA “questions and concerns” about its “issues.”

Naturally, this overt lying to media and to members by a sitting PRSA National Chair should have resulted in Anthony D’Angelo of Syracuse University being booted off the PRSA National Board and kicked to the curb from PRSA’s membership for gross ethics violations.

Instead, that’s not what happened. What happened instead was this:

A PRSA-cartel deal got made.

A few months after D’Angelo’s lying fiasco occurred (with no accountabilty for D’Angelo), D’Angelo decided that his chairmanship year of 2018 would be a super-duper time to induct Del Galloway (of University of Florida alumni status) as a PRSA “Gold Anvil” Award honoree.

After all, Del Galloway had rushed to D’Angelo’s aid that year, posting on the MyPRSA online member message board a full-throated endorsement of D’Angelo and other PRSA leadership ethics violators.

Galloway even got other PRSA Past Chairs to co-sign his MyPRSA post (which featured as Galloway’s avatar a photo of Galloway with — <CLEARING THROAT LOUDLY> — Bill Gates).

D’Angelo’s October 2018 presentation to Galloway of the Gold Anvil on the main stage of PRSA’s International Conference (ICON) in Austin, Texas, was one for the ages…

…in the category of a textbook case study of dis-informational gaslighting, of epic proportion.

This video of D’Angelo’s / Galloway’s mutual lovefest and ghastly display of PR-ethics-violations-on-acid includes my insertion of concurrent news headlines about Galloway’s PR employer, Wells Fargo…. which, soon thereafter, was reported by The Wall Street Journal to have behaved “like a mafia” to silence internal critics, and also was fined $3 billion by the U.S. Justice Department for its misconduct:

While D’Angelo gushed on stage about how ethical Galloway was and how Galloway was D’Angelo’s personal “mentor” and whatnot, at no point was it publicly announced at the same time, that D’Angelo ALSO had seen to it that Galloway was appointed by PRSA as a rep on the ACEJMC mass communication accreditation body.

As it so happened, Syracuse’s own ACEJMC re-accreditation status was coming up for renewal in future years. Coincidence?

During that interim timeframe, Galloway clawed his way up the ACEJMC political pecking order, to become the President of the ACEJMC himself, in 2022, which Galloway relayed in a “Hey-Hey” e-mail to then-PRSA Chair Dr. Felicia Blow, in this legally obtained doc (FOIA):

Dr. Blow then proceeded to alert her PRSA National Board members that she intended to appoint University of Florida staffer and alumnus / “Gator” Mickey Nall, as yet another UF appointee to the Galloway’s ACEJMC…

Turns out, UF’s own accreditation review was also upcoming. So why not stack the ACEJMC deck even further?

More Galloway-gushing and idol-worship thus issued forth, from the PRSA Twitter handle, as retweeted by a fellow cartel supporter / beneficiary (@Fiskey)…

…who also is a UF Gator + PRSA Past National Chair, and also formerly employed with Wells Fargo, and also was appointed to the ACEJMC, and also later received a PRSA Gold Anvil herself…

Got that?

While serving on the ACJEMC academic accreditor in the years post-2018, Galloway lorded over his accreditation-powers fiefdom.

Galloway made it abundantly clear what partisan politics needed to be on rabid display at any university’s upcoming site visit, if they didn’t want their program downgraded and then publicly shamed:

Then, like clockwork, at the appointed time — Voila!…

Galloway signed the letter himself for ACEJMC reaccreditation of Syracuse’s PR program employing Tony D’Angelo.

This maneuver is called quid pro quo.

Syracuse’s D’Angelo Gives Galloway PRSA Gold Anvil + ACEJMC Council Slot = Syracuse Gets Its ACEJMC Re-Accreditation with FLYING COLORS (mostly orange).

It’s a massive conflict of interest, and when taken into consideration with other literal PRSA “cartel” activities, it’s part of a pattern of antitrust illegality.

For conflict-of-interest kicks and giggles, as already noted, Galloway also got to sign the reaccreditation letter for his own Gator Nation alma mater at University of Florida, when UF’s PR program came up for review just last year:

Prior to Galloway’s “favor” given to his good ol’ Gator Nation alma mater, UF posted profusive gushing about Del Galloway’s new ACEJMC role in 2022 on UF’s College of Journalism and Communication website — the very academic program that Galloway’s ACEJMC was pre-scheduled to be reevaluating in 2024-25.

In the Can’t-Make-This-Up category of naked self-dealing…

Gator Land even gave Galloway his own designated / tagged web page on UF’s website, as an “altar” of sorts, for Del Galloway + PRSA publicity, praise and general egomaniacal sucking-up:

Antitrust Violations, AHOY!

Meanwhile, other university academic program competitors — like the legendary and Hearst Prize-award-winning journalism school at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill — were placed on “provisional” / or downgraded status by Galloway / ACEJMC, on DEI grounds, with sham findings that UNC failed to comport with Galloway’s and PRSA’s (and Omnicom’s and Joe Biden’s) own like-minded, left-wing partisan ideals of DEI dogma.

It seemed UNC-Chapel Hill was being punished by Galloway, for allowing its school to be named in those recent years for a conservative donor and media owner, Walter Hussman.

Del Galloway himself volunteered for the site-review team for UNC-Chapel Hill, even though he had already been posting negative tweets against the university on his social media PRIOR TO the UNC site visit.

Galloway denigrated the university only months ahead of his own UNC site visit for the ACEJMC, for not showing what Galloway deemed as proper deference to the New York Times’ controversial and history / fact error-riddled “1619 Project.”

These ethics violations by Galloway are documented on my blog post about this issue.

Instead of Galloway being held accountable for his all-new set of conflicts of interest / ethics violations, he was rewarded, by being made President of the entire Council.

Del Galloway’s ACEJMC made sure the entire academic world knew about the UNC accreditation downgrade, with rife negative publicity that essentially implied UNC-Chapel Hill had a massive racism problem.

Later findings of open-records showed that poor UNC-Chapel Hill administrators were not allowed even to know WHY they were being downgraded, prior to ACEJMC leaking the news to media outlets.

Public-domain e-mails clearly show UNC-Chapel Hill already was receiving media inquiries about the downgrade BEFORE UNC staff was given the formal letter by ACEJMC officials, telling UNC they were downgraded and the reasons for it (DEI).

Looks like a manipulated media hatchet-job to me!… performed by someone with Wells Fargo-level ethics-violation credentials and mafia-like kneecapping skills:

Lots of fox-guarding-the-henhouse stuff in PRSA.

As such, the people in charge of enforcing PRSA’s rules are often the worst rule-breakers themselves. For example, in 2026, PRSA’s Jane Dvorak, who has a long, painful history of ethics violations herself (many are mentioned in my other blog posts), was made “Grievance Chair” of PRSA.

Dvorak now controls the PRSA cartel’s trashing of in-bound member complaints to PRSA, so that valid complaints of PRSA leaders’ misconduct never see the light of day.

How “curious”!…

Much of PRSA’s fox / henhouse culture has benefited “Gator Mafia” personnel, such as Galloway and his former Wells Fargo colleague + fellow PRSA Past Chair Rosanna Fiske, as well as current UF PR Program “senior lecturer” and Past PRSA Chair Mickey Nall and UF alumnus / 2024 PRSA Chair Joseph Abreu:

All three — Galloway, Nall, and Fiske — are now PRSA “Gold Anvil” winners, yet all three have been implicated in excessively well-documented and repeated PRSA ethics violations, whether tied to PRSA / Wells Fargo shenanigans, or tied to accreditation / certification conflicts of interest with PRSA and UF.

PRSA’s “Gator Mafia” dominates in matters of PRSA’s nationwide / global PR industry influence, in its seemingly obvious non-compliance with U.S. federal antitrust laws and PRSA’s so-called “Antitrust Policy.”

PRSA’s Antitrust policy has been widely skirted, thwarted, and even all-out ignored by PRSA’s own National Board leadership.

PRSA’s Antitrust policy also has been mostly hidden.

I only discovered this policy myself in the past year or so, through a government open records request of a publicly employed “Gator Mafia” member’s e-mails, where the policy was squirrelled away, deep within a PRSA Board “orientation” packet e-mail attachment.

To that point, because PRSA has kept many of its more commonly broken policies / rules hidden from its own rank-and-file members, “Gator Mafia” members (and their friends / accomplices) are never actually held accountable for gross violations.

As such, cartel members know ahead of time that they will be shielded / protected, which only further encourages their bad behavior.

One specific friend / enabler / beneficiary of the “Gator Mafia” cartel in PRSA leadership, Garland Stansell, told me back in 2017 while Stansell served as PRSA National Secretary – and while I was a dues-paying member simply seeking out (begging for) what PRSA’s own rules were – that I was disallowed from even seeing PRSA’s secret policies and procedures (“PnPs”).

Why? Because, Stansell claimed PRSA PnPs were “confidential.”

At that time, PRSA also had concealed all PRSA Board meeting minutes, including voting Assembly minutes, even though doing so violated New York State statutes.

The PRSA Board meeting minutes were only restored to member access, after I publicly protested what PRSA leaders were doing to cover up their shady activities.

2017 PRSA Chair Jane Dvorak gave false and misleading claims to members, to imply I was lying in my protests about PRSA’s concealment misconduct.

Later, after I spent years from 2017-2020 internally reporting countless other PRSA National ethics violations and millions in financial discrepancies, this specific participant and beneficiary of “Gator Mafia” white-collar hooliganism — Garland Stansell — personally signed in March 2021 PRSA’s expulsion letter himself of my own PRSA membership, on false grounds, via PRSA’s kangaroo court.

In his letter, it appeared Stansell took great delight in issuing to me a lifetime ban — an illegal boycott (yet another violation of antitrust law) — from all PRSA events and venues, as if I were a leper or some form of miscreant.

I was disallowed from ever knowing who was on PRSA’s “Grievance Committee” (separate from PRSA’s “Grievance Panel”) or its “Audit Committee,” so that culprits who provided the green-light for PRSA’s kangaroo court could be anonymized / protected.

This concealment was a violation of PRSA’s own “grievance” policy.

This is precisely how illegal cartels operate:

• Secrecy and deflection and protected power abuses for themselves.

• Threats, defamation, illegal boycotts / exclusions, and dehumanization for those who protest their misconduct.

“Gator Mafia” activities have included their organized boycott against me within PRSA, in a highly collusive, unethical, politically motivated and illegal set of actions that took place in Q1 2021 — interestingly, as soon as Joe Biden was elected to the White House and would be appointing his own people at the Justice Department.

I hope and pray for accountability to PRSA’s years-long ethics violators who have benefited from their own illegalities.

Until then, stay tuned to this blog for more truth-telling!…

Disclaimers:

• No information provided in this blog is intended as legal advice; the author of this blog is not an attorney. PR industry practitioners who feel their responsibilities and/or rights relative to legal compliance have been harmed or compromised are encouraged to consult their own legal counsel.
• Identifying verified illegal cartels in the PR industry falls under U.S. antitrust law and is prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
• Consult your own legal counsel, if you need advice on legal issues tied to antitrust law.
  • Current and past PRSA National Board members and “key persons” who may believe they have been party – whether knowingly or unknowingly – to possible PRSA antitrust violations that fall within federal statutes of limitations may wish to engage their own personal legal counsel, because PRSA’s legal counsel will primarily be focused on PRSA, Inc.’s own corporate self-interests, not PRSA volunteer board members’ personal legal liability and risks. Note that PRSA’s long-time legal counsel (Venable, LLP) had a prior, undisclosed (to PRSA members) contracting history with Omnicom’s Ketchum PR in its specific work advancing Russian Federation government commercial interests.
  • NOTE: PRSA Antitrust Policies have clearly stated that compliance with antitrust rules falls back on individual members, which potentially implies that PRSA may leverage this stipulation as a rationale not to indemnify or pay for volunteer board member legal liability that could result from a federally prosecuted antitrust settlement / legal award.