Southern Methodist U. Denies Employee’s Claims About Hidden DEI Program

Southern Methodist U. Denies Employee’s Claims About Hidden DEI Program

This is one of those cases where an employee spoke to someone without realizing the conversation was being recorded.

FOX News reports:

Methodist university denies operating ‘hidden’ DEI program after undercover video posted of school official

An official at Southern Methodist University was captured on undercover video describing what she called “a lot of maneuvering” surrounding the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to footage released by Accuracy in Media that purports to show how DEI initiatives continued under different names.

The video, shared Monday by school choice activist Corey DeAngelis, alleges SMU renamed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion the Office of Cultural Intelligence as part of an effort to keep DEI programming less visible.

The SMU staff member, who is identified in the video by Accuracy in Media as Danielle Palomo, coordinator for community engagement, social change and intercultural engagement division of student affairs, said, “As you can probably imagine, we’ve had to do a lot of maneuvering in order to remain kinda hidden under a lot of things. But as long as we can keep doing what we’re doing even to a smaller capacity, that is what we’re going to do. We’re going to do our best.”

In the video, an undercover journalist asks Palomo, “I was hoping to see if y’all had any existing, like, equity trainings that maybe y’all provide for staff faculty and that would give us an idea of what to go off of.”

Palomo responded, “So, all of that is held through our Office of Cultural Intelligence. As you can probably imagine, we’ve had to do a lot of maneuvering in order to remain kind of hidden under a lot of things. But my office in particular, we do — we have had trainings like that in the past with students.

“It’s not going to be as severe, hopefully, as some of the other public universities have had to deal with, but I know that the university is definitely finding its like ‘P’s and Q’s’ and it’s slowly like working to like rename things and maybe do away with things,” Palomo said in the video.

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