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CHAPEL HILL UNC chancellor Holden Thorp spiced up the buildup to Wednesday night's North Carolina-Duke basketball game with a trash-talking tweet he later deleted.
During an online roundtable on innovation, Thorp, a semi-regular user of the social networking site Twitter, typed: "Our students are talking about the future and asking smart questions instead of wasting time sitting in a tent."
Zing!
Thorp, of course, was referring to Krzyzewskiville, the tent city near Cameron Indoor Stadium where Duke students camp out for basketball tickets for a good chunk of the winter.
Thorp's volley whipped quickly across cyberspace Wednesday, prompting a great deal of, er, high-minded intellectual debate between fans of the two teams.
Duke president Richard Brodhead isn't on Twitter. But at The News & Observer's behest, he offered up this good-spirited response: "Hey Holden, someone hacked your Twitter account to talk trash. May the best team win. From the land of TRUE Blue, Dick."
By midafternoon, UNC was apparently doing damage control. Thorp's initial tweet disappeared from his feed, and a new, apologetic tweet appeared.
"Sorry about the tent/Kville tweet," Thorp wrote. "Both U's have great students. I shouldn't have gotten carried away by our rivalry in basketball."
