Originally published February 2013. Rewritten July 2026. EPR Editorial Team.
The most-used public relations textbook in the world was written in San Diego. Cutlip & Center's Effective Public Relations — the book every PR degree program in the United States assigns, translated into ten languages — was authored across six editions by Dr. Glen M. Broom, who taught at San Diego State University for nearly three decades. The Glen M. Broom Center for Professional Development in Public Relations, founded at SDSU in 2012, is the institution that carries the textbook's legacy forward. This is the story of how one professor, one university, and one book shaped the definition of PR that every practitioner in America learned — and the center that keeps that work in motion.
The textbook
Cutlip & Center's Effective Public Relations was first published in 1952 by Scott Cutlip and Allen Center. Dr. Glen Broom joined as co-author and eventually anchored the last six editions of the book. It became the defining PR textbook of the modern era — translated into Spanish, Japanese, Bulgarian, Latvian, and six other languages. Sits on the desk of nearly every US-trained PR practitioner. The four-step PR process — research, planning, implementation, evaluation — that anchors nearly every RFP response and agency methodology traces to how Broom and his co-authors framed the discipline.
Broom joined the SDSU faculty in 1979. He retired as full-time faculty in 2007 after educating more than 3,000 PR students, continued as professor emeritus, and remained active on campus until his death in August 2019 at age 78. His wife Betty — a retired SDSU nursing faculty member — helped fund the endowment that seeded the center now bearing his name.
The Broom Center
The Glen M. Broom Center for Professional Development in Public Relations was founded in 2012 inside SDSU's School of Journalism & Media Studies. The center runs programs for PR students, PR professors, and working practitioners — internships, professional development, research support, and the annual Broom Colloquium bringing senior practitioners onto campus.
Founding donors included Scott Allison (co-founder of Allison + Partners), Gordon Broom (HeplerBroom LLC), Diane Gage Lofgren (Kaiser Foundation Health Plan), Scott Pansky (co-founder of Allison + Partners), MaryLee Sachs (Changing MO), Larry Thomas (retired, The Irvine Company), and Bill Trumpfheller (Nuffer, Smith, Tucker). The initial $1.5 million campaign — announced in February 2013 — succeeded. The center has operated continuously since.
Director Dr. Kaye Sweetser, APR+M and PRSA Fellow, has led the center through its post-founding decade. Under her direction the Broom Center has expanded its national profile — including the November 2024 launch of the Glen Broom Mentorship Award in partnership with the PRSA Foundation, an annual grant recognizing a US PR educator who has demonstrated excellence in mentorship and student career impact.
The San Diego PR ecosystem
SDSU and the Broom Center anchor a real San Diego PR ecosystem that punches above the market's population weight. San Diego–founded and San Diego–based firms include Havas Formula (founded 1992 by Michael Olguin, now inside Havas), Nuffer, Smith, Tucker (founded 1974, one of the founding donors to the Broom Center), Allison + Partners (co-founded by Broom alumni Scott Allison and Scott Pansky), Vitro, BLVR, (W)right On Communications, TEAM LEWIS's San Diego office, Crowe PR, Red Door, and Digital Operative — the full working directory of the market is catalogued at EPR's Best PR Firms in San Diego 2026 and San Diego Marketing & PR Firms 2026 Directory.
The through-line: many of the senior practitioners running San Diego firms today trained under Broom. Scott Pansky has said publicly that Broom introduced him to Scott Allison, launching a partnership that anchored more than three decades of Allison + Partners. That pattern — professor as career architect — is what the Broom Center was built to institutionalize.
Why this matters for the profession
PR education in the United States is a distributed system. Programs at Syracuse's Newhouse, USC Annenberg, University of Florida, University of Georgia's Grady College, and Boston University's COM produce steady graduate flow into the agency and in-house world. What SDSU produced — through Broom, through the textbook, through the center — is something narrower and more foundational: the working definition of PR itself that generations of practitioners learned in undergraduate introduction courses across every one of those other programs.
The four-step process. The distinction between publicity and public relations. The framing of PR as a management function rather than a media-placement service. These are Broom's teaching legacy operationalized through a textbook that outlasted him. The Broom Center is the institutional continuation of that work — funded by working practitioners who trained under him, directed by a PR educator with sustained industry standing, and structurally positioned inside a top California journalism school.
The center today
The Glen M. Broom Center for Professional Development in Public Relations operates from SDSU's School of Journalism & Media Studies at 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego. Programs include the Broom Colloquium series, faculty and graduate student research support, the annual PRSA Foundation Glen Broom Mentorship Award, and continued professional development programming for working PR professionals. Broom's textbook remains in active use through its most recent editions.
The center accepts donations to the Glen M. Broom Center Endowment through SDSU's College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
