140

I have 140 emails from Susantifft@aol.com in my email archive—one email, appropriately, for every character allowed in a Twitter post. I taught Prof. Tifft how to use Twitter.

I showed up to her office unannounced. It was Spring, and it was stiflingly hot that day. A few weeks back, during a typically engaging discussion in her journalism seminar, we had been talking about the tools the news media used to cover the Hudson River plane landing, and she mentioned that she’d love to learn more about Twitter. So I showed up, nearly a month later, unannounced, to teach her.

I brought with me a “lesson plan,” which I’d tapped into my iPhone on the bus earlier that day. She was busy, I could tell, but she waved me in. We went through the basics and then the not-so-basics. It is a 12-minute conversation I’ll remember forever.

A day or two later, she sent me an email. The subject: “Thanks for the Twitter lesson.” “Alex, I haven’t had time to delve into it yet, but rest assured I will,” she wrote. She did. On May 15, 2009, a year before she was to present the first Tifft Teaching Award here, Susan Tifft clicked a button and followed me on Twitter.

It doesn’t matter that she only updated her account three times. What matters—so much—is that she cared enough about her craft and about me to make time for something new when her world was spinning faster than any of us could imagine. Thank you, @susantifft, for all that you were and are.

Alex Klein

Online editor, The Chronicle

Trinity ’11