Will norton ole miss

I was up the next morning about 3 am and left the house at for a 6 am Chicago-bound flight out of Memphis. Our more than hour flight took us almost over the North Pole before traveling south over Siberia to the capital of China. We landed a little before p. I was having dinner in the View restaurant above the Marriott at Times Square when I learned that the Ole Miss baseball team was having a reunion on the weekend of the series against Louisiana State University.

This was the team that went for the season and beat the University of Florida for the SEC championship. Will Norton announced his retirement as Dean of the School of Journalism and New Media after a more than year, highly distinguished career in journalism education, the immediate reaction among longtime friends and colleagues was one of disbelief.

After all, Dr. Norton — a spry year-old who seemed to be aging in reverse — is well known for running circles around many of his far younger faculty members, and for being as committed to making corny puns as he is to cultivating a global free press. Charles Overby, with whom Dr.

Norton traveled extensively on behalf of the Freedom Forum and collaborated on the establishment of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, says Dr. And he does listen. I think he sees every person he meets as someone to learn from. Then-Mississippi Today reporter now editor-in-chief Adam Ganucheau first reported some of the aforementioned remarks from the Sept.

Ganucheau had obtained a copy of the recording of the meeting from an anonymous source. The Mississippi Today report did not mention that faculty members had named Tartt as the probable source of the images that Meek reposted; Ganucheau told the Mississippi Free Press last year that he had tried to confirm Tartt as the source of the photos but had not been able to do so.

Norton was on the board of directors of that publication until last summer. Some of the emails the Mississippi Free Press obtained showed that Norton and others in the school had discussed an effort to identify the leaker or leakers. Wenger and Wilkin both put out statements condemning the content of the emails , though without mentioning Norton by name, and vowing to make changes to be more inclusive.

This publication has obtained emails showing that other news outlets in the state received copies of the Norton-Tartt emails starting in April The whistleblower group that obtained the email, Transparent Ole Miss, passed the emails along to another anonymous whistleblower group, Ole Miss Information.

Both groups shared copies of the emails with this publication. The Mississippi Free Press obtained 10 years of IHL meeting minutes through a public-records request and also examined minutes from the months since Norton resigned. There is no record of the IHL granting any special exceptions to its policies to Norton or any other UM faculty member. The next month, Samir Husni, a journalism professor and the head of the on-campus Magazine Innovation Center, sent an email to Interim Dean Wenger on behalf of faculty members complaining about the whistleblowers.

He is an immigrant from Lebanon whom Norton hired in the s. Husni previously served as chair of the journalism department in the s and s before its transformation into the School of Journalism and New Media. But in December , UM Chancellor Glenn Boyce placed Caffera on administrative leave while the investigations continued even as the ombudsman declared he was not affiliated with the whistleblowers.

University faculty members outside the journalism school who had confided anonymously to the ombudsman about employment issues in their own departments told the Mississippi Free Press at the time that they feared that the whistleblower hunt would result in their own identities being exposed and open them up to retaliation. Caffera remained on administrative leave even after the EORC shared its findings with the administration on Jan. The university still has not identified the whistleblowers.

Norton has never publicly addressed the controversy over his emails and has not responded to a number of requests for comment since last summer, including one today. Norton was the chair of the UM journalism department before it was its own school in the s and remained until , when he left for a position as dean at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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