UNC Asheville dean admits she loves breaking anti-DEI rules
June 3, 2025
Megan Pugh, the Dean of Students at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, admitted to Accuracy in Media’s hidden-camera undercover investigators that she loves “breaking rules;” specifically, the rule by the Board of Governors’ banning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) across the University of North Carolina system.
In terms of DEI work, Pugh said they “Gotta keep it quiet.” Asked if it was being kept on the “down-low,” she agreed, and added, “But, I love breaking rules.”
When one of the investigators commented, about “Breaking rules, having fun doing it,” Pugh replied by saying, “You know… until more or less, they get mad at us. But they haven’t done it yet, so.”
What’s more, is that Pugh said that the school itself is supportive of keeping DEI, and the school would be open to hosting implicit bias trainings in the future, despite the fact that the UNC system was “very specific” in its language barring implicit bias trainings in a way that she says “I don’t enjoy.”
“My hope and my intention is that we can still incorporate those things, like even under sort of a broader banner of, like, I don’t know, I guess we’ll see where it fits,” she said. “But I try to include those things wherever I can.”
Pugh said, “Yeah, exactly,” when asked about incorporating implicit bias and anti-racism trainings but being “creative” about how they are included.
You can watch the full video here.
AIM recently also released footage showing an administrator at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte talking about how she uses “finesse” to evade the Board of Governors’ ban on DEI. This received responses from even the United States Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. The administrator was fired as a result of AIM’s investigation.
You can send a message to the Board of Governors for the UNC system to let them know that the Dean of Students, and other school administrators across the UNC system, should not be openly bragging about violating the ban on DEI by going to SaveNCSchools.com.