You might not have heard the UVA Chapel bells ringing at 3:07pm last Wednesday, but within minutes, you might have seen on the UVA Fine Arts Library’s Twitter account (UvaArtsLib) that the bells were sounded to mourn a member of the 7 Society who had died that day. That’s one of the many ways Twitter, which allows users to post short comments in real time, has streamlined avenues of communication—and personality—at UVA.
UvaDeanJ, the office of admissions’ handle, is among many of the university’s offices that use the service to put a human face on the faceless project that denies high schoolers (71 percent of them, this year) entry to the college of their choice. On December 9, someone in the office tweeted, “How do I get all the pet essays in my stack? It’s 10:20 AM and I’ve already cried over a sweet dog essay.” Another tweet linked to a blog post where two plagiarized essays were excerpted. The University’s Twitter account (UVA), which is manned by the “tweeps in Public Affairs” (“tweeps” is short for “tweople”) tweeted on December 9, “Reading tweets from #UVa students has us wondering: When do they sleep? Or do they?” One student “brandidone” retweeted the message and replied, “I didnt sleep. Clemmons Libry was 2 much fun.”
For Bob Bruner, dean of UVA business school, Twitter is a perfectly valid community of ideas. One post from last week read, “Will Rogers said, ‘One revolution is like one cocktail, it just gets you organized for the next.’ Implications for public policy today?” These musings are widely read: 474 users follow his tweets. In September, Bruner blogged a response to a journalist who had asked why more deans don’t use outlets like blogs and Twitter. He wrote that he does so “to engage a social network—these media help to build connectivity with one’s community. I find that it works.”
Meredith Woo, dean of the college of arts and sciences, joined Twitter in August and has posted about twice a week since. In many tweets Woo, like Bruner, links followers to one of her blog posts or a bit of university news.
Most tweople tweet weekly—and never five times fast—but Larry Sabato, who runs the Center for Politics, stands at the fount of an unceasing stream of tweets. Sabato’s addiction to the format is so severe that the Center’s website features the best of Sabato’s tweets for each week. He is also something of a tweater, or, a cheater. On December 5, he tweeted (twate?) a stunning 541 characters in a span of nine minutes. Blog territory? You be the judge.
One tweet that made the “best of” list was later retweeted by a user who masquerades as Mr. Jefferson himself (Thos_Jefferson). TJ retweeted, “How grand. RT @LarrySabato: My far-flung UVA friends will want to know that Mr. Jefferson’s Lawn is being covered with snow…” Which begs the question: What would Jefferson, always a sucker for a community of ideas, have tweeted? (“La. purchase all mine for $15 mil. Now US is 2X!”) An August 2007 tweet from another of Jefferson’s accounts (ThomasJefferson) may stay most true to the man himself: It reads, “Delay is preferable to error.”
C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.
