Dear Chancellor Plowman: About UT’s DEI “Audit” . . .

The University of Tennessee-Knoxville has a massive "Say / Do" disconnect (gaping hole) in its DEI "compliance" story.

I love my university alma mater. I really do. Always have, always will. Blood-runneth-orange and all the things.

But sometimes, true love requires tough love. What follows here is precisely that. As all of America has observed in recent years, the stunts being pulled in academia these days have gone off the rails.

In particular, I resent what “Diversity / Equity / Inclusion” (DEI) and its fanatical culture have rendered to my beloved University of Tennessee and its core integrity.  

Mind you – as a moderate conservative myself – I used to have no problem years ago with the idea of “diversity” promotion because of the way it originally had been packaged and sold as a concept.

Back then, “diversity” nomenclature conjured up for me a “sharing and caring” ethic, of listening to understand other people from all walks of life and providing a hospitable, welcoming environment to all — in a culture of universal non-discrimination — so that everyone could succeed and thrive.

Yep — very “Kumbaya” and Pollyanna, for sure. But that’s how I perceived it. No zero-sum games. No wolves in sheep’s clothing. But then, somewhere along the road in subsequent years, something changed. And I mean drastically.

Today, “diversity” has long-since morphed from “sharing and caring” to a counter-opposite DEI agenda of “blaming and shaming,” commandeered by the political left.

Over the past five years in particular, I’ve distinctly observed DEI’s partisan political underbelly manufacturing and stoking more synthetic hate and curated divisiveness than ever existed organically in our modern era.

It’s a critical issue that DEI started as a perceived good-faith “let’s not discriminate against people” effort, to what today is instead a “let’s discriminate against all the ‘right’ people,” as defined in partisan political terms.

And this bait-and-switch situation with DEI’s evolution really matters as an ethics issue — because it’s been confusing and has caught many people unawares, in slow-drip fashion.

DEI-branded changes to systems and cultures were made some years ago, under DEI 1.0 of “Kumbaya.” But we’re now into DEI 3.0, and laws are getting broken all over creation, such as illegally discriminatory hiring and promotion practices based on race, ethnicity and/or gender — that now are complicated to unwind.

We’ve also seen in academia the DEI movement often completely ignoring religious freedom as part of diversity conversations. Some of the same DEI proselytizers have engaged in antisemitism on campuses, for example.

As a career-long public relations strategist by trade, I’m sad and angry to report that my global industry sector in PR / advertising — much of it headquartered in the U.S. / New York — is and has been for many years now a major culprit, enabler, and veiled profiteer of that insidious underbelly of DEI-on-the-take. Many — not all, but many — PR / ad agencies (especially the multinational ones) have cashed in on DEI “PR” consulting, whether in billable hours projects or in big, fat retainers.

The legally noncompliant and far-left-wing Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) announced in February 2025 it was “doubling down on DEI,” I’m sure to lend contrived legitimacy to DEI for their large agency members and to keep those PR consulting and crisis-management dollars flowing. (PRSA’s Foundation awards numerous student scholarships and internships with a racial-profile requirement of no whites allowed. The Foundation’s current board chair is an executive with Omnicom-owned FleishmanHillard).

PRSA includes among its membership Tennessee-based chapters in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Nashville and Memphis, with many Tennessee-based university and government employees, including UT-Knoxville PR faculty and staff, writing dues checks each year, potentially with taxpayer dollars.

PRSA has urged all of its thousands of members (including those who are government-employed) to do the same in “doubling down on DEI,” seemingly regardless of legal-compliance conflicts of interest.

PRSA even pushed out webinar content in May 2025 to teach the full PR industry on how to manipulate language on DEI purposely to mask it as something else — which is tantamount to fraud, violates PRSA’s own Code of Ethics, and speaks to Senator Marsha Blackburn’s recent letter of concern to UT Chancellor Donde Plowman, who collected an award herself just last year from PRSA’s Volunteer Chapter.

(Note: Omnicom-owned and New York-based Maslansky + Partners — a presenter in the below PRSA webinar clip — is a former subcontractor to Ketchum PR in its prior engagement as PR firm of record to Vladimir Putin’s government / the Russian Federation. More on that in a minute.)

The scale of the facilitated legal noncompliance and — I’ll go ahead and say it — the PR industry corruption here, is nothing short of stunning.

Back to the current situation on Rocky Top:

The University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s portion of nationwide academia’s ongoing DEI drama has made its own national headlines lately. I won’t regale you with all those headlines here, but here are a few snippets:

As boiled down to its fundamentals, the Volunteer State is currently contending with UT’s off-again (the Chancellor Davenport era), on-again (the past seven years), off-again (the past few weeks) “commitment” to the DEI Church of What’s Happenin’ Now.

I don’t expect anyone to be perfect, as I’m certainly not.

But for Pete’s non-gender-specific sake, if a United States Senator tells your taxpayer-funded institution of higher learning to follow state and federal law and to cease-and-desist with verifiable DEI-motivated violations of civil rights, then you might want to come clean about cleaning house, admit that you indeed have issues that must be rectified, and darn well comply.

But in response, UT did what UT always seems to do when under pressure: They whipped out their Big Orange Screw-driver and cranked down the bolts on the status-quo, by stonewalling.

To that end, in her own written response to Sen. Blackburn, Chancellor Plowman dismissed out of hand the very idea that UT has a DEI-related compliance problem at all.

Instead, Dr. Plowman threw her own employees under the bus who had been caught on video — essentially calling them liars publicly — by stating point-blank that the recent incriminating footage of UT employees telling the truth about UT’s creative DEI wordsmithing practices “strongly misrepresent the policies and practices of the university,” which is, of course, hogwash.

The good Chancellor then proceeded to pinky-promise Sen. Blackburn – in writing – that the whole of UT “has always complied with both the letter and the spirit of the law” on DEI… in what she would only gingerly tiptoe around, in referring to DEI as the newly de rigueur PC term, “access and engagement” (thereby — ironically — proving Sen. Blackburn’s original point, that DEI is indeed masquerading at UT under different monikers).

Can’t make this up!

So, in sum, Chancellor Plowman chose to go the gaslighting route with a sort of doe-eyed “Who…. Moi?” retort of (essentially) “Nothing to see here!”… to a United States Senator, no less.

In so doing, Chancellor Plowman now has only made UT’s problems worse.

To that point, I have a real bone to pick with UT, as an alumna and as a Tennessee taxpayer.

Thanks to all their jive, we have certain inconsistencies of faith in the Church of What on Earth is Really Going on Here. For a truckload of cases in point, I need only meander over to my particular slice of UT alma-mater real estate: the UT College of Communication and Information (UT-CCI), led by Dean Joseph Mazer.

I graduated from the public relations program at UT-CCI in 1994, which, at that time, was housed within the UT School of Journalism.

Today, that program’s home can be found within the UT-CCI Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations, courtesy of what I can only imagine was an exceptionally generous seven-figure-ish (?) gift announced in March 2022 from the award-winning Knoxville-based advertising agency, the Tombras Group.

Tombras’ national headquarters is located in quite a tony pile of bricks, on Downtown Knoxville’s Gay Street (no DEI pun intended for the out-of-towners).

And when I say “award-winning,” I’m not just talking about an ADDY here or there from the local Knoxville chapter of the American Advertising Federation.

These folks fly to the venerated industry Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on the French Riviera and collect trophies alongside the very best in the business. So, you know… respect is due for their formidable creative talents and competencies, and I genuinely mean that.

But not even the creative geniuses at the Tombras School’s namesake firm can likely wordsmith enough for Chancellor Plowman, to help finesse her way out of UT’s epic DEI “Say / Do” disconnect, relative to legal (non)compliance.   

Chancellor Plowman has now marked her line in concrete, that UT is compliant.

But there’s this thing, you see.

It’s called the “Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations Bylaws” which I just downloaded a few hours ago from UT’s website, in addition to UT-CCI’s bylaws as well.

They make for interesting reading, in light of all this DEI “compliance” talk.

Being bylaws, the document below is core to the “governance” function of a key program of academic study at the Tennessee taxpayer-funded and federal-government taxpayer-supported UT-CCI.

The Tombras School’s “Bylaws” include not one – but two! – “Diversity Plan Statements,” right under the Vision and Mission for the entire School:

Turns out, the Tombras School operates a “standing committee” (meaning it never goes away and its work is never considered complete) on DEI.

According to the bylaws, this DEI standing committee (which perhaps has now been named something else) operationalizes and stewards the School’s “diversity action plan.”

The Tombras School doesn’t appear to post its “diversity action plan” online, but — No need!

We have instead the “Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations Strategic Vision” document, complete with “Measure Success By…” indicators and assignments of quantitative metrics.

Here are just some of the excerpts of that eye-opening document, which speak to potentially unlawful race-based recruiting / hiring / promotion / matriculation:

Beyond mere strategic plans, the Tombras School has stated quite explicitly for the record that UT-CCI is all about recruiting and promoting based on race / ethnicity:

Now, this is where things get awkward, to say the least.

The evidence in clear, written print about the Tombras School’s and UT-CCI’s overall racial targeting in particular does not meld well with mandates for federal compliance to current, long-standing legal statutes.

Among President Trump’s Executive Orders banning unlawful DEI practices, we have the following:

The U.S. Department of Justice also has made its announcements clarifying lawful versus unlawful activity in this regard:

To boot, over in the Tennessee State Legislature, we had the Divisive Concepts statute passed in 2022 outlawing race and gender-based stereotyping and scapegoating (inherent to Critical Race Theory) from being integrated into taxpayer-funded education, including at the university level:

On that point, I protested just in recent months content by a third-party “partner” to UT-CCI’s student chapter of PRSSA in the Tombras School. This hyper-partisan partner (EveryLibrary) pushed and made available this kind of divisive-concepts content (below) for Tombras School students to learn, as part of their research for the organization. UT-CCI officials apparently approved of this content:

My December 2024 report to UT-Compliance was brushed aside and deemed “not substantiated,” via a “we check our own homework” / home-cookin’ style of investigation by UT Compliance (my opinion), which fully protected and shielded from accountability the “doubling down on DEI” PRSA association involved in this noncompliant activity.

We’ve also seen passage in Tennessee of state laws, just in recent months, such as the:

  • “Dismantling DEI Departments Act”
  • “Dismantle DEI in Employment Act”

As per her recent letter to Sen. Blackburn, Chancellor Plowman would have us all believe – mere country mice that we are – that the DEI fairies swept in overnight in July, waved their magic wands, and self-sanitized all potential UT policies, procedures and craptastically unconstitutional hiring, student / staff recruitment, and scholarship practices that it took YEARS for UT to create, institute, embed and entrench across the entire institutional culture.  

But alas!…

It turns out that UT-CCI website and social media assets have squirrelled away – in all kinds of nooks and crannies – more incriminating DEI evidence than UT’s Compliance Department can shake a stick at (or at least more than the University’s webmasters can hastily remove before someone as annoying as I am stumbles upon it).

For starters – beyond their governance bylaws and operational “metrics” smoking guns – we have Tombras School-branded DEI tomfoolery littered all over the Internet, which has not been taken down or corrected for the record. These mammoth tranches of pro-DEI historical content are informing AI results on simple searches, such as this one, below:

We also have this self-congratulatory Ad Age trade press story, from March 2022, just as Team Tombras took over as the School’s new donor-sheriff in town:

Back in 2022 (that not-so-long-ago Biden-era DEI heyday), I imagine both Tombras and UT-CCI practically shared a cigarette as they mutually basked in the afterglow of a national trade story of this nature, replete with do-gooder kudos and mutually beneficial brand props and attaboy back-slaps.

But check out that bit in Paragraph 2, above… and the line, “The goal is to double the number of BIPOC graduates that enter the industry from the University of Tennessee during the first four years of the program.”

As such, Tombras and UT divulged mutual intentions to target, recruit and graduate (a verb) students as motivated by UT based on race (“BIPOC” meaning Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) in order to meet a quantified, pre-set goal – not on economically disadvantaged status without regard to skin color, and, without apparent regard to academic performance meriting a UT-CCI diploma.

If this practice is still going on, that smacks of potential legal-noncompliance, folks.

Says who?  Says the U.S. Supreme Court (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina). And so says the Tennessee legislature.

The date on the Ad Age story is March 29, 2022.  The Supreme Court decision putting a definitive end to race-based college admissions was in June 2023 – more than two years ago.

The U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division hasn’t minced words on this topic:

Tombras CEO Dooley Tombras pronounced in the Ad Age story that UT-CCI’s race-based recruitment for his namesake school would go on for at least four years in order to meet their BIPOC-specified race-recruitment goal, as I understood the trade press story.  Which means they’re only in Year 3, as of now in 2025.

Was this DEI program of race-based recruitment halted?  If so, then was the change in practice announced?  If not, then why the information void?

Mr. Tombras himself revealed even more at the conclusion of the Ad Age article, saying of his own private firm’s DEI posture:

“DE&I has been a massive focus here, a multi-year focus. I think unlike a lot of agencies we’ve been focused on doing it top-down. We’re committed to having 13% BIPOC leadership by the end of next year. We’re about halfway there right now and we’re already over 50% female, senior leadership.”

Meanwhile, the Tombras Group might want to recalibrate their own AI inputs for ChatGPT, which currently reports a different Tombras gender-employment story entirely:

I should also point Mr. Tombras and the entire PR industry to a study that gets swept under the rug from years ago as published in The Washington Post, clearly showing that mandatory “diversity training” in workplaces actually results in reductions of both women and racial / ethnic minorities in management. Go figure!

(Other similar studies have since been drowned out by the pro-DEI PR industry, with false assurances that “DEI is good for business!” — which is roundly false, when you check under the hood and kick the tires of “studies” making such claims.)

Not to pick on them too much, but the Tombras ad agency has managed millions in federal government contracts, at least in the past. I presume they’ve now modified their own race- and gender-based hiring and promotion practices to meet the new federal focus, if they want to secure future contracts or keep the ones they might currently service.

But did Tombras relay their compliance efforts back to UT and encourage UT-CCI to do the same?

Granted, it’s not Tombras’ job to be sure UT follows the law. But let’s face it, money talks.

As I’ve learned from personal experience, UT-CCI’s Dean Mazer and (even more especially) Dean Mazer’s predecessor have demonstrated they are much quicker to snap to attention when Mr. Tombras calls UT up with a suggestion than when persona non grata Mary Beth West dares ask, “Hey – why are you allowing violations of these legal statutes?” I know this, because my last e-mail to Dean Mazer asking such questions is two months old, with no reply.

So believe me, I’ve asked many questions. In writing. Multiple times. On far more topics than what I’m detailing here.

In fact, since December 2024, I’ve registered numerous issues and a wide range of questions via UT’s “Divisive Concepts” Compliance e-mail address (divisiveconcepts@tennessee.edu), all of which are publicly discoverable, by the way.

It seems that nearly every time I’ve urged UT-CCI to stop engaging with hotly politicized, partisan organizations keen to indoctrinate the next generation of mass communicators, I’ve been swatted away like a house fly and mostly ignored. (Sound familiar, Sen. Blackburn?)

Meanwhile, UT-CCI Dean Mazer continues collecting DEI plaques and participation trophies, at every whip-stitch, it seems.

Like this one, last year, from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) (not to be confused with the accrediting body, the ACEJMC):

Or like this “trophy” from the so-called “Diversity Action Alliance” (DAA):

And excuse me while I rail a bit on the DAA, which I personally refer to as Diversity Atrocities Anonymous.

As I have chronicled extensively as a lone conservative whistleblower of the PR industry, the DAA is a bona fide failure of a PR industry “nonprofit” that – in point of fact – bled so much red ink for the elite Page Society when Page housed this boondoggle across recent years that Page divested themselves of the DAA just this year. The DAA was clearly NOT “good for business” at Page. (Makes you wonder where all the DAA’s member / sponsor money went, huh?)

Here’s a video clip, below, of the DAA doing what the DAA does:

Instructing the PR industry on how to track metrics on DEI staff hiring and advancement, by submitting swaths of granular, private employee data, for the express purpose to bean-count how many people of different genders, races, and ethnicities the employer has, in order to keep said organizations (like UT-CCI, apparently) “accountable” to prescriptive and purified DEI race / ethnicity / gender-driven hiring and promotion expectations.

Sounds a little fascist-y to me.  

Again – I’m no lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV – but I’m pretty sure there is some patently illegal stuff potentially going on here… what, with all these companies handing over databases of their NAMED EMPLOYEES (without said employees’ permission, mind you) to unaccountable third parties and with those employees’ private racial / gender-identity data and stats on whether they’ve been hired / released (fired?) / promoted / demoted.

Who chairs the DAA this year and therefore gets to see everyone else’s race / ethnicity / gender employment data? The Chief Diversity Officer of Omnicom. More on them in a minute.

The clincher for me in the above video clip is when the database instructor tells the DAA’s trainees that if an employee refuses to divulge their gender / ethnicity, then just make it up and stick a value in the database, based on stuff like “visual cues,” which I can only presume means “Does that staffer look Black?” and “Does she sound Hispanic?”…

Talk about having a front-row seat to how the DEI sausage is made! Thanks, YouTube! Having received a recent trophy from this tribe does not exactly serve UT-CCI well… at least not now.

Not to be outdone in DEI ridiculousness, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) has inflicted its own brand of strong-arming and beating UT-CCI into DEI submission, particularly in recent years…

Del Galloway is the PRSA (“doubling down on DEI“) appointee to the ACEJMC.

Mr. Galloway wrote the tweet below while also serving on the ACEJMC in 2020, thus making sure all mass communication programs in higher-ed nationwide knew precisely where his politics stood.

Foolishly, the ACEJMC placed Mr. Galloway in charge of the ACEJMC, as President for the past several years. A Florida Gator (sorry… gotta get the dig in!) and longtime PR Department alumnus of longtime ethics-embattled Wells Fargo, Mr. Galloway has run his academic accreditation command-and-control fiefdom to lord over academic programs like the Tombras School at UT-CCI:

As the Tombras School’s so-called “accreditor,” it’s important to know that the ACEJMC isn’t even recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, so its “accreditation” has no bearing on UT-CCI’s access to federal funds / grants, scholarships, or loans.

Which begs the question — Why on earth does UT-CCI participate in this worthless, expensive, time-consuming, and excessively stressful-to-staff ACEJMC rigmarole?

Numerous highly respected J-Schools have abandoned ACEJMC accreditation — and rightly so, given its negative return-on-investment.

But this fact certainly hasn’t stopped Mr. Galloway and his ACEJMC overlords from scaring the bejeezus out of mass communication programs throughout all of Christendom, under implied threat that if programs like UT-CCI fail to embrace Mr. Galloway’s partisan and divisive-concepts-entrenched world view and jump through all of ACEJMC’s extreme DEI hoops, then they will have their “accreditation” yanked or, like UNC-Chapel Hill, publicly “downgraded” and shamed on DEI grounds by ACEJMC, even without merit.

To use a President Obama favored catch-phrase – “Make no mistake!…” – Mr. Galloway is a DEI activist of the most cynical, regimented, and destructive order, in my highly experienced view of having dealt with this person.

For example, in this YouTube compilation video of what I term “Del Galloway’s Greatest Hits,” Mr. Galloway’s race-baiting remarks include his assertion that if a “Latino” walks into a room with either too many “white” or “Asian” people present, then there’s a serious problem afoot that must be remedied:

As for legally noncompliant and utterly despicable DEI dogma-run-amok, look no further than the ACEJMC’s publicly posted “Reports of ACEJMC Evaluation” for UT-CCI, among some 120 other mass communication schools nationwide.

ACEJMC “compliance” is a massive pressure-cooker of unlawful practices that judge program validity largely by skin color and gender of those faculty and administrators doing the work at hand of educating young people.

The ACEJMC has demanded that academic programs like UT-CCI prove their DEI “compliance” within their accreditation-review documentation, while sucking the oxygen out of schools’ valid activities like – oh… I don’t know – teaching students how to make an honest living in a communication career. 

If nothing else, the ACEJMC critique of UT-CCI should prove to any Compliance official with a brain that legally noncompliant DEI is more than alive-and-well at UT-CCI.

To further prove the point, the ACEJMC has quietly changed its “Standard 4. Diversity and Inclusiveness” label to “Advancing a Culturally Proficient Workforce.” (Cue the eye-roll!). (Of interest to the Tennessee State Legislature, Dr. Pitts as noted below is an MTSU faculty member.) This newsletter article by the ACEJMC was only published online in recent days:

In fact, thanks to ACEJMC documentation alone, the U.S. Justice Department has enough smoking guns for a full-on autopsy report at DEI’s OK-Corral.

It’s a veritable bloodbath of evidence.

On full Internet display are UT-CCI’s DEI calisthenics, gymnastics and gyrations to kowtow to Del Galloway’s accreditation sham – which, incidentally, is a whole other story.

Speaking of other stories, I can’t allow to escape mention the UT-CCI Tombras School’s so-called “Purpose Project.”

“Purpose” is one of those (seemingly innocuous) DEI dog-whistle words — precisely one of the ilk that Sen. Blackburn was rightfully protesting in her letter to UT.

It’s intended on the surface to fly under the legal compliance radar, all the while, left-wing partisan political agendas – which have no place in taxpayer-funded universities in Tennessee due to the state’s “Little Hatch Act” law, among others – plow ahead, with pedal-to-the-metal intensity that remains widely undetected. And, many of them funded with taxpayer dollars.

Naturally, as someone with at least a modicum of knowledge about PR industry players, I can’t help but notice that on the only-three-person “advisory board” of this new “Purpose” initiative at the Tombras School, Ketchum PR is included.

Well, well, well.

I have quite a personal history with Ketchum’s hijinks. You can read all about it, here.

But apart from that:

New York-headquartered Ketchum PR and its multi-billion-dollar conglomerate ownership at Omnicom still have a lot of explaining to do, not only to the global PR industry but also to the world, as to why they opted to represent Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation for some nine years during most of the Obama Administration, and – quite relatedly – why / how Ketchum personnel showed up throughout more than 30 pages of the U.S. Department of Justice May 2023 Durham Report on “Russia collusion.”

Page 161 of the DOJ’s Durham Report

I may be but just a country mouse over here in the Tennessee foothills of Appalachia, so it’s getting tough for me to cipher on this…

But why do Omnicom and Ketchum constantly appear to be whitewashing via DEI-advocacy blather to distract from vast appearances of their own years-long corruption — and now, why is my own alma mater essentially helping them do that?

After all, we also have current allegations in more than one court of law about Omnicom’s own anti-female hiring / firing track record, as well as that ugly FIFA World Cup-related human-trafficking “sportswashing” lawsuit against Omnicom agencies filed just this year in New York’s Southern District.

It’s understandably unnerving to me that my own alma mater is now gladly giving Ketchum the royal treatment with one of the only three available seats at UT-CCI’s “Purpose”-labelled DEI table.

I asked my good buddies over at ChatGPT about Ketchum’s for-profit money-making DEI agenda, and here’s what they had to say:

So, like so many of the big PR firms, DEI is big business and cash-ola for the Ketchum / Omnicom people, and they DO. NOT. WANT. TO. SEE. IT. DISMANTLED.

Food for thought:

Is UT’s DEI “Purpose” Project helping Ketchum / Omnicom get their own PR groove back, and if so, is it legally compliant?

How did Omnicom / Ketchum find its way on this rather obscure DEI passion project by the Tombras School?

Does Dooley Tombras want for his ad agency to be acquired someday by a multinational conglomerate with as deep a pockets as Omnicom?… (Not an accusation, just a question!). Still… can you say, “Exit Strategy”?

“Purpose,” indeed!

I also note that on the UT Purpose Project e-mail address (purposeproject@utk.edu), Dr. Joseph Stabb — a PR professor at UT-CCI — appears to be the owner of it.

Dr. Stabb now serves as Chairman of the PRSA (“doubling down on DEI“) Educators Academy:

Even pre-dating this year, Dr. Stabb was leading in recent years PRSA conference sessions for other nationwide PR educators on the topic of circumventing state statutes halting unlawful DEI practices.

These social media posts document the messages:

PRSA’s DEI / Critical Race Theory (CRT) webinar content has included excerpts like this:

PRSA’s more ludicrous (cringeworthy) online DEI instructional content has also included a past National Chair of PRSA (a white female) explaining how she rebuked her Black male VP-level executive client for not demonstrating what she felt was proper sensitivity to DEI messaging in his own workplace.

The extremes here on display — and, the fact that UT is likely paying for faculty / staff PRSA membership dues from taxpayer-funded budgets — should give compliance authorities pause:

I could continue going on and on here, but let me wrap up — at least for now — by saying this much:

When I was a UT School of Journalism PR major “back in the 1900s” — as the youngsters like to tease me — lying wasn’t allowed.

At UT-CCI’s old-school J-School that I attended, if you dared spell even one single name wrong by one letter in a journalism reporting assignment, you scored an automatic zero. It was brutal. But it worked! It taught me and all of our fellow students that getting your factual story straight was non-negotiable.

And telling both sides of a story in journalism mattered back then. Interjections of a student-reporter’s opinions or pontifications or “social justice” activism in what was supposed to be a straight-up news report also was grounds for a failing grade.

And following the law?… I mean — Puh-leeze.

Being legally compliant was expected of everyone — to the extent that we students didn’t have to question whether basic ethical behavior was occurring among our faculty and administrators, like we obviously do now on these DEI (non)compliance issues. Partisan politics in the classroom was rarely observed…. you’d far more likely encounter it as a student over in the Humanities Building in a poli-sci class… but not in the Communications Building, believe it or not.

But a lot has changed in 30+ years.

Sure — there are great facilities now at UT-CCI, far more staff, better technology, etc. Clearly, money has been invested. And, I’m sure that a lot of really good, valid, and proper educational instruction is going on at the College, which the theme of this essay does not focus on, admittedly.

But there is a reason for that, and it’s this: I’m fed up.

What I’ve seen churned out from the DEI Industrial Complex in recent years is rotten. It breaks my heart that UT has allowed itself to be owned and overwhelmingly dominated by it, to the level of obsession that the UT Administration is now appearing to play a very destructive smoke-and-mirrors game with federal officials. UT’s brand reputation and stakeholder trust are going to suffer, if leadership refuses to stop with the gaslighting.

I thank God every day that America woke up and smelled the coffee (and the kool-aid!) on this DEI crock, back in November. I’m further grateful to the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, and members of our Tennessee delegation as well as the state legislature for bird-dogging the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out of this deal, to root out the root-rot that’s taken hold of our most sacred of institutions: educating our young people.

I say this to UT’s Chancellor Plowman and President Boyd:

With due respect, please do better on UT’s DEI Say / Do Disconnect, because it’s egregious and an embarrassment to the Volunteer State. And, worse still, elements of what’s going on here are against the law. Please be more candid, transparent, and responsive.

Mary Beth West was UT-CCI’s 1994 Sammie Lynn Puett Public Relations Student of the Year and was honored as the College’s 2013 PR Alumna of the Year, in the first year the honor was bestowed. She received the 1994 UT Chancellor’s Citation for Extraordinary Campus Leadership and Service, later serving for some 20 years on the UT-CCI Board of Visitors, appointed by her former Communications Law professor, the late UT-CCI Dean Dwight Teeter.

She was abruptly dropped from the UT-CCI honorary Board of Visitors in April 2021, after ACEJMC Chair Del Galloway helped lead a contingency of compromised PRSA leaders to oust West from the PRSA trade association in violation of anti-retaliation provisions in New York State Not-for-Profit Corporation Law, due to West’s massive evidence of PRSA financial discrepancies and ethics / legal misconduct, which also involved officials from Ketchum (Omnicom). She can be followed on X (@marybethwest) and LinkedIn, and she can be contacted via e-mail at mb@marybethwest.com.

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