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May 21, 2009, 04:24 PM ET
UT Austin Humor Magazine Writers Impersonate Institution's President on Twitter
A Twitter account claiming to be written by the president of the University of Texas at Austin, William C. Powers Jr., is actually the work of writers of Texas Travesty, a student-run humor magazine at the university.
Ross Luippold, editor in chief of Texas Travesty, claimed authorship of the parody Twitter account in an e-mail message to The Chronicle today. “When we first started, a lot of people thought it was real, and many of his followers still do (somehow),” wrote Mr. Luippold. “I really hope we don’t get shut down. Running the Powers account is way too fun.”
“More than anything else, we thought it’d be funny to create a fictional campus character, and this fictional character happened to share a name, likeness, and profession with William Powers, the president of the University,” the student wrote, adding that they have been dropping issues of their publication featuring the parody at his office hoping for a response. “When we never got a response from his office, we decided that if he didn’t care about the stuff we wrote about him in a joke paper going out to 30,000 people, he wouldn’t mind if we made a Twitter in his name.”
A Chronicle article online today noted that another university president has a false double on Twitter as well: Georgetown University’s John J. DeGioia. That Twitter parody is the work of a writer for Georgetown’s student humor magazine, The Georgetown Heckler. —Jeffrey R. Young
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