In a moment of crisis, Santa J. Ono has no place to hide. That’s because nearly 54,000 people are following the University of Cincinnati president every day.
College leaders increasingly use social media to communicate in real time or to establish street cred with students, but Mr. Ono’s tens of thousands of Twitter followers qualify him as a pioneer in the emerging realm of digital higher-education administration. He regularly updates his Twitter feed with photographs, musings, and gentle provocations — “Shake Shack or In-N-Out?” — and answers students’ questions directly, no matter how mundane. Indeed, few university presidents talk so much or to so many in 140 characters or less.
But the past few days have tested Mr. Ono’s reputation for accessibility and off-the-cuff candor. On July 19 a University of Cincinnati police officer shot and killed an unarmed man during a traffic stop, after the officer said he was nearly run over by the motorist.
The officer, Ray Tensing, is white, and the 43-year-old victim, Samuel Dubose, is black, thrusting the university into a difficult national conversation about community policing and race.
The incident has the makings of a powder keg for the university, and college leaders in similar situations are often encouraged by lawyers and communications advisers to err on the side of caution in their public comments. For Cincinnati’s Twitter-happy president that may be more of a challenge, but he says he has edited himself more than usual in recent days.
“I try to think twice before I tweet; I think even longer than that in this kind of situation,” he said in an interview. “I am very careful. Even though it’s a personal account, I represent the institution as well.”
An Easy Target
At the same time, Mr. Ono wants to uphold his reputation for responsiveness and openness. In several instances over the last week, he has answered direct questions on Twitter about the university’s decision, in the wake of the shooting, to limit university police patrols to the campus and adjacent areas.
He fielded one such question from Kimberly K. McCarthy, the mother of an engineering student who will be starting his sophomore year at Cincinnati in the fall. Ms. McCarthy was concerned that her son’s apartment, which is located just off campus, would no longer be patrolled by university officers. Mr. Ono assured her that the campus police would still be active in the area, which Ms. McCarthy said had put her more at ease.
“It’s not like these presidents who sit in their office and ignore everyone,” she said. “He makes you feel important in his Twitter response as well as through his Twitter presence in general.”
But Mr. Ono’s outsize social-media presence also makes him an easy target in a crisis. He describes the feedback he has received as mostly cordial, but there has been plenty of vitriol aimed at @prezono:
Asked about that sort of criticism, Mr. Ono observed: “There are some individuals who are passionate about their opinions.”
Available Yet Constrained
As much as Mr. Ono appears available through social media, he has crafted only a few original tweets about the shooting. The first, which he sent out two days after the incident, linked to his first official statement, which described “unimaginable sadness for all involved.”
The president was on vacation when the shooting occurred, and university officials described any delay in his statement as a cautious effort to ascertain the facts of the case before commenting on it.
Suzanne E. Boys, an associate professor of communications at Cincinnati, said Mr. Ono had managed to appear responsive and sensitive without saying more than he should about a developing investigation.
“He’s not really getting into the nitty-gritty,” Ms. Boys said. “He is smart enough to know that, by legal rationale, he needs to be constrained.”
At the same time, it would be odd for a president who has tweeted more than 38,000 times since 2010 to say nothing about a tragedy that strikes a national chord. Peter F. Lake, who has written extensively about higher-education law, said that any risks associated with a president’s use of social media in a crisis are probably outweighed by the unique opportunity to personalize the institution’s response and to help shape the narrative of a controversial story.
“There is no question that it runs against a longstanding trend in higher education to be very careful about public utterances from senior leadership,” said Mr. Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. “But what’s interesting to me is that this signals a change in higher ed that may be coming. We may see more senior leadership who become extremely adroit at real-time social-media communication.”
‘A Challenging Situation’
If anything threatens to chip away at Mr. Ono’s reputation for transparency, it is a controversy over the yet-to-be-released body-camera video of the shooting. The Associated Press and other news media have filed a lawsuit to force a Hamilton County prosecutor to release the video.
Joseph T. Deters, the prosecutor, has said that doing so could taint grand-jury deliberations over whether to bring charges against Officer Tensing.
Mr. Ono, who said he had not seen the video, asserted that the university has a “legal responsibility to release all public records.” At the same time, he said he must defer to the prosecutor under the circumstances.
“It’s definitely a challenging situation for us,” Mr. Ono said. “But we certainly have to be a law-abiding institution. If we’re asked not to share something, we’re not going to go down that path.”
Mr. Ono has asked the prosecutor to show the video to the victim’s family, and he made that request public on Twitter. There is no indication that Mr. Deters heeded the request, and a public-information officer at his office said she could not comment on the matter.
For Mr. Ono, social media is just one piece of the university’s crisis response. He has held a news conference with the city’s mayor, met with community leaders, and announced plans for an independent external review of campus-police practices and policies. On Tuesday the president attended Mr. Dubose’s funeral.
Daniel A. Zaiontz, author of #FollowTheLeader: Lessons in Social Media Success From #HigherEd CEOs (EDUniverse Media, 2015), said it is important that college leaders view the Internet as just one of many important vehicles for engagement.
“It shouldn’t be the be all and end all of presidential communications,” Mr. Zaiontz said. “It is one tool in the tool kit. It doesn’t take away the importance of face-to-face communication.”
Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.
