The Twitter account identified as belonging to Georgetown University’s president, John J. DeGioia, features frank admissions about the mundane details of running a modern academic institution. Last week, for instance, the microblogger wrote that his face was tired from all the “fake-smiling” during graduation events. The PR office can’t possibly approve, right?
Right. And neither does Mr. DeGioia. The Twitter account, which points to the president’s real home page, is produced by a prankster.
Mr. DeGioia is not the only university leader who has inspired a false double on Twitter. The president of the University of Texas at Austin, William C. Powers Jr., has one, too.
Just this week, the fake Mr. Powers started joking with the fake Mr. DeGioia on Twitter about the hassles of commencement season. “Dreading going into work tomorrow, but those diplomas aren’t going to sign themselves …,” quipped the Twittering Mr. Powers.
The real Mr. Powers contacted Twitter officials a couple of weeks ago to ask them to remove the account, said Robin Gerrow, assistant vice president for public affairs at Austin, “because it’s not him.” So far he has received no reply.
Georgetown leaders have likewise asked Twitter to remove the fake account for Mr. DeGioia. “We think it violates their terms of service,” said Andy Pino, Georgetown’s director of media relations. “We think the author has not made it explicitly clear that he is not Mr. DeGioia.”
Officials for Twitter did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
Inspired to Spoof
So who are these impostors?
At Georgetown, the culprit is known: Jack Stuef, an undergraduate who edits a student-run humor magazine called The Georgetown Heckler, publicly revealed his identity in student publications.
Mr. Stuef got the idea while writing an article for the online magazine’s last issue of the academic year. “Making fun of your college president is kind of your bread and butter for your college humor magazine,” he said.
No one from the university has contacted him to complain, he said. “I don’t even know if they know what Twitter is,” he said. (The Georgetown spokesman pointed out that the university does run an official Twitter account.)
As Mr. Stuef paints him, Georgetown’s president is aloof and always jetting off to raise money for the institution. “He doesn’t really seem connected to what’s going on,” the impersonator said of the real Mr. DeGioia. “He’s always really slow to realize when there’s a major controversy going on.”
So a typical message by “Q: What’s the deal with airplane food? A: I don’t know, let’s establish a working group to find out. OK, I’ll put the laptop away.”
Mr. DeGioia is in Rome on university business this week and could not be reached for comment.
The Chronicle could not determine the identity of the Austin campus’s presidential Twitterer, and Ms. Gerrow, in the public-affairs office there, said the author remains a mystery to the university, too.
Both universities admitted that careful readers would probably realize that the comments are not authentic.
But Michael L. Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University who studies Twitter and other social media, says he thinks the spoofs are revealing. “I actually like how ‘authentic’ they seem (and actually are in a funny way)—even though they are actually ‘fake,’” he said by e-mail.
A couple of actual college presidents really do post to Twitter, though their updates are a bit more guarded. Among them are the president of Ohio State University, E. Gordon Gee, and the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda.
