To start at the beginning, Brian Gallagher was made CEO of United Way Worldwide in 2009, where he held his position until 2021, according to the Associated Press. During his time as CEO, United Way was described as having a sexist culture where it was “run like a boys club, where women have to work harder to get ahead” as reported by Emily Peck on HuffPost. Qualified and loyal women were constantly overlooked for promotions, which were instead given to underqualified men. This was far from a new problem. Gallagher was simply following a long history of sexism and CEO scandals at United Way.
It's not hard to see why, in such an environment, three women filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), speaking out about experiencing sexual harassment from various men within the company. Subsequently, over 20 female employees sent a letter to United Way’s Board detailing their experiences facing harassment and discrimination at the company, detailed on Candid’s Philanthropy News Digest. Despite these many testimonies, none of the alleged sexual harassers faced any sort of punishment. Some were even promoted after. One woman that spoke out, Lisa Bowman, was chronically under-supported for months as her team members were slowly transferred to the oversight of the person who inappropriately harassed Bowman. She was even directly ordered by Brian Gallagher to fire one of her subordinates without any stated reason after that employee also spoke up about harassment (Harasshole, pp. 141-143). These were clear retaliation attempts that Bowman later realized were aimed at getting her to quit. When they didn’t succeed, she was just abruptly let go for no reason other than “her position was no longer needed because [Gallagher had] hired someone else to handle her role” recalls Lisa Bowman in an interview with HuffPost.
On top of this, United Way retaliated against its own vice president for labor participation, Ana Avendaño, who was fired after the President of the AFL-CIO complained to Brian Gallagher about her work on sexual harassment within the labor movement. Emily Peck reports that the AFL-CIO, one of United Way’s oldest fundraising partners, had local labor leaders that were “propositioning and groping female United Way workers…hired to coordinate union fundraising.” Like Bowman, these women were ignored or faced retaliation when they spoke out about these issues to their local United Way leadership.
Consequently, it must be understood that Brian Gallagher played both an active role in defending the perpetrators and retaliating against the victims while passively encouraging a culture of sexism that ignored discrimination against women. Even though United Way conducted internal and external investigations that concluded the claims of sexual harassment and discrimination were unfounded, they have been accused of being one-sided and incomplete. According to a HuffPost article, nearly all of the women, victims, or former employees involved were not even contacted for the investigations, which were also missing records of HR complaints and email and text threads. Clearly, the investigations were meant to repair the company’s image rather than address the systemic issues behind its sexist culture.
Additionally, over 33 local United Way chapters sent letters to their Board of Trustees expressing their loss of confidence in Gallagher’s leadership, Emily Peck reports. They stated, “To accept the conclusion that United Way Worldwide bears no fault or responsibility, you would have to believe that a number of former employees got together, created an untrue story and gave up their jobs (in some cases)/risked them (in other cases) and decided to drag United Way Worldwide through the public mud. That seems like a lot of effort if you are happy and feel valued in your job.” Consequently, over 220 local chapters committed to withholding their dues to United Way in protest of the scandal and overall culture of sexual harassment Peck reveals. The women who spoke up were met with such broad support from their co-workers, evidencing how prominent United Way’s culture of sexism really was and calling into question the company’s innocence in these matters.
When Gallagher was finally pressured into resigning in 2021, he never had to acknowledge his harmful contributions to this scandal. Instead, he was paid $1.5 million dollars in the final year of his employment in 2021, according to The Nonprofit Times. Shockingly, throughout this scandal, he had been quietly serving on Ball State’s Board of Trustees, having been appointed in 2017 and serving all the way up into the present day, as seen in this Ball State University announcement.
While people might not have known about his influence, its effects are definitely present. As the Vice Chair, he has significant impact in the University’s decisions and sets the standard for what’s acceptable, detailed at Ball State’s Board of Trustees page. For him, that has been a standard of sexism and unaccountability. Anonymous students have shared accounts where they have personally faced or witnessed sexual harassment from their superiors while employed at Ball State. When they reported it, nothing happened. They were, quite reasonably, scared to come out publicly due to possible retaliation and losing their jobs.
Ball State’s dishonorable choices don’t end with Gallagher, however. One year ago Ball State hired Michael Conner, despite knowing that he had illegally broken into the home of Tiffanie Williams, an innocent woman, and assaulted her 5 years ago, reported on here by the Indy Star. Williams is still facing legal battles to this day, and Conner has since faced no punishment and, as mentioned, was still hired at Ball State. Despite a petition on Change.org for Conner’s removal reaching over 1,100 signatures, Ball State’s Board of Trustees has stayed silent, mirroring Gallagher’s strategic silence at United Way when it came to enforcing their code of ethics.
Just like at United Way, when people chose to spoke out about the issues, Ball State has chosen to either remain silent or retaliate, even against their own students. Feminists for Action orchestrated a letter writing campaign to the Board about this issue in the Spring of 2025. A petition for Brian Gallagher’s removal has 1,147 signatures. This petition mirrors the letters from local United Way's chapters to their Board detailing a loss of confidence in Gallagher. It is clear that Ball State students do not trust him to make decisions in regard to our safety, our money, or our university. Ball State chose to ignore their students, not even making a formal statement.
In response to the Board’s deliberate choice to remain silent, a group of students attending their Board of Trustees meeting in Spring of 2025 forced the Board to publicly face their betrayal of Ball State’s own professed values. When these students spoke up, asking the Board how long they were going to ignore various issues, including Ball State’s investments into companies aiding Israel in its genocide of Palestinians—as reported by Ball State student Cooper Archer—and Brian Gallagher’s membership on the Board of Trustees, they were pulled out of the meeting, arrested, and held in jail for over 5 hours, which can be read about at Ball State’s Daily News. This directly mirrors Gallagher’s retaliation against female employees at United Way in an effort to silence them.
Just this past month, another protest was held at a Board of Trustees meeting by Ball State students advocating for the removal of Brian Gallagher and other issues, including the removal of Michael Conner, support for Suzanne Swierc, and divestment from genocide. Filling nearly the entire meeting’s viewing area, it was one of the largest protests to attend a Board meeting yet. When the meeting was ending, Board Chair Rick Hall made a seemingly impromptu announcement about Brian Gallagher. He claimed that the students’ accusations were either incorrect or flatly untrue, cited the aforementioned investigations as proof of Gallagher’s innocence, and brought up the Board’s positive relationship with Gallagher as evidence of him being a good person.
These were all the exact arguments used by both the previous Student Trustee and the current one when they were reached out to about this issue. It is important to note that the Student Trustee is not democratically chosen but rather selected by the governor, which is also true for the rest of the Board of Trustee members. However, it is the first time the Board has issued an official statement, breaking their strategy of silence. Rick Hall stated that this would be the last time they would address the issue, but the student protestors—responding to Hall with boos and shouts of “Shame!”—took his statement as a sign that the Board was beginning to cave under almost a year of organized pressure from students.
It is evident that this issue, both at United Way and Ball State, is unresolved and ongoing. Brian Gallagher is still serving on Ball State’s Board of Trustees, and Lisa Bowman is in the process of suing United Way. For every second that Brian Gallagher remains a part of Ball State, its reputation as a safe space for learning, and the reputation of its students’ degrees, are being undermined. Once Bowman’s case is heard in court, the United Way scandal will once again be brought into the spotlight and, consequently, so will Gallagher’s employment at Ball State.
In order to avoid this, Ball State must follow in United Way’s footsteps and let Gallagher go. Such similar issues occurring at both United Way and Ball State demonstrate that we need a similar solution. He needs to resign or be fired in order to protect student’s safety, Ball State’s reputation, and keep Ball State in accordance with their own supposed values of Excellence, Integrity, Social Responsibility, and Beneficence that they promote on their website.
Sam Allen wrote this Op-Ed. Op-Eds can be submitted via email to newsroom@CIMuncie.org.
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