John Wright, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, is now officially the coolest dean ever.
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In a recent post detailing a UF student’s unfortunate spate of plagiarism, I mentioned being suitably impressed that Wright communicated his initial reaction, in part, through a status update on his Facebook account. As I stated at the time, in my humble opinion, “[I]f Wright also tweets, he is officially nominated for “The Coolest Dean … Ever Award.’”
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Yesterday, the Web administrator for the UF CJC announced on the UFJSchool Twitter account: “Welcoming @jwright721 to Twitter. According to one blogger last week, this now makes him the ‘coolest dean ever.’”
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I am proud to say I am that blogger. And I hereby confirm Wright’s ascendancy to “coolest dean . . . ever” status and seriously wish him well on his Twitter journey. As his opening tweet hungrily announced, ”On my way to the Swamp for lunch.”
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There are a few j-school/com school deans on Twitter, but they’ve only updated a few times:
UNC Chapel Hill
@jfolkerts
University of Miami (my alma mater)
@samgrogg
Excluding any assistant deans (because @sreenet would win, hands down), I’d say Geneva Overholser wins the deans-on-Twitter category:
@genevaoh
As for coolest dean ever, I’m pretty biased towards Grogg.
Just found another one, UNL’s dean:
@wnorton1
Greg- Good to hear from you. Your nominations are well taken! Now the second question: Do these individuals also have active facebook profiles in which they communicate with students and their faculty charges? The FB profile is what originally pushed Wright to the ‘coolest ever’ forefront.
A good question! But I’m not friends with any except Grogg and the other profiles are not public, so I can’t tell.