Lawrence to take job at UC Davis in late March, stirs controversy with posts on personal Facebook page
USC’s first-ever vice president for communications, Luanne Lawrence, will leave the university this semester after 2 1/2 years on the job.
Lawrence will stay at USC until mid-March, she said, and be named the associate chancellor for strategic communications at the University of California, Davis, a school she said she’s admired throughout her career.
She’d been mulling the move for at least a month, USC President Harris Pastides said, before she made what she called a “decision to return home to the West” in an internal email to top administrators Thursday. Lawrence came to USC after six years as the vice president for university advancement at Oregon State University.
Lawrence earned $236,900 a year at USC and will make $260,000 in her new job, said Claudia Morain, a spokeswoman for UC Davis. USC did not have a chance to present a counteroffer, Pastides said.
When contacted Friday, Pastides said he hadn’t had a chance to think about who would replace Lawrence. He plans to consider possible interim appointments this week and expects USC will conduct a nationwide search for her permanent replacement.
He also said his considerations would include possibly restructuring the communications department.
Lawrence is credited with rolling out the university’s first integrated marketing campaign — dubbed “No Limits” — that aims to rebrand the school and ultimately improve its national reputation. That campaign was launched in September and is planned to last three years at a total cost of $300,000 per year.
She was also responsible for opening the “Carolina on King” welcome center in Charleston, S.C., updating the communications staff’s training and improving USC’s social media presence.
“I think we’re a lot farther down the road because of Luanne’s leadership,” Pastides said, adding that he initially created her position because he thought the university had grown large enough that it “needed to be contemplating its image.”
But in the last few weeks it was social media that’s raised issues for Lawrence.
On her personal Facebook page, which is publicly viewable, she posted daily “true confessions,” starting on New Year’s Day. The first three focused on food and obesity in South Carolina, including some seemingly disparaging remarks about the state and comments in which she said she missed fresh food and mountains in the West.
“Standing up from the table at Lizard’s Thicket to get to the car is not my idea of an active life,” Lawrence wrote in one post. “Why can’t everyone live a well life and decimate obesity and the diabetes, heart disease and ailments that come with it?”
The posts, which have since been deleted, roiled many on Lawrence’s Facebook, circulated among some administrators and were lambasted on the libertarian blog FITSnews.com and The State newspaper’s “The Buzz” column.
But Lawrence said that she wrote the posts as an experiment to see what tone and “trigger words” social media users would react to most, that they’ve since been taken out of context and that in its totality, the experiment was not inappropriate.
She intends to write an article about her findings for a professional journal, she said, but she declined to name the publication.
“I still believe I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lawrence said Saturday. “I wouldn’t have done it again if I knew it would hurt someone’s feelings ... I’m afraid that some people believe that I’m a bad person and that I was blasting the South, and that certainly wasn’t what was happening. I don’t know how to help them understand that my intentions are great.”