Yesterday, College Ave., a blog out of Ithaca College, reported that a faculty meeting was to be held today at Ithaca’s Park School of Communications. Could it be that the topic was current Dean Dianne Lynch’s imminent departure? Sure looks that way.
For the past couple weeks, Lynch has been in serious talks with UC Berkeley Provost George Breslauer about taking the reigns as the next dean of the J-school. (Check out our recent blog post on the topic here.) When Breslauer was asked if he could provide an update on the situation, he responded, “Not yet.” Lynch could not be reached for comment.
However, a caller claiming to be an Ithaca College professor phoned the Express this morning and left a voicemail. “There’s probably a 90 percent chance that in the next week Dianne Lynch is going to announce that she’s going to be the new dean at the Berkeley School of Journalism,” he said. “The buzz is all over the Park School, has been for a couple days.”
The caller said that while Lynch would likely “set the tone” for the announcement at today’s faculty meeting, she wasn’t planning to make a formal announcement until after the Park School’s graduation ceremony Sunday.
There was no way to confirm the caller’s identity. When the Express called the telephone number associated with the call, we were connected to the Park School of Communication’s main exchange, where a message indicated that all calls originating from the Park School were identified with the same phone number.
