NORMAN – Joe Foote, a University of Oklahoma alumnus and national leader in journalism and education, has been selected to serve as parade marshal for OU’s Homecoming Parade on Saturday, Oct. 24.
Foote is being honored for his years of leadership, from 2004 to earlier this year, as dean of the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
“Joe Foote is one of the most outstanding members of the OU family,” OU President David L. Boren said in announcing the selection. “He is widely beloved for his recent role as a student-oriented dean at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications. An OU alumnus, he is a perfect choice to be parade marshal.”
The parade, which is scheduled to begin three hours before kickoff of the OU-Texas Tech football game, will start on Elm Avenue between Lindsey and Boyd streets, travel north on Elm, east on Boyd, south on Asp (toward Oklahoma Memorial Union) and then east on Brooks. It will end in front of the Union.
Foote was passionate about increasing professional opportunities for students on and off-campus. He founded the Gaylord Ambassadors program, an undergraduate leadership group that has become a model on campus, and led the college to create Lindsey+Asp, one of the nation’s premiere student-led advertising and public relations agencies as well as “Sooner Sports Pad,” a live, weekly television broadcast to 10 million television households on Fox Sports Oklahoma and Fox Sports Southwest.
His leadership resulted in the College being named one of the top 10 journalism programs in the nation by the Radio Television Digital News Association and TVWeek.com.
Foote has been fundamental to the success of the university’s “digital initiative” and was an early advocate for innovation in courseware and alternative teaching modes. Under his leadership, Gaylord College was one of the first university programs in the nation to be designated as an “Apple Distinguished Program” for its innovation in the use of technology in education. Gaylord College has now received the Apple distinction in three consecutive competitions and is still the only major mass communication program in the nation to achieve that feat.
After completing more than a decade as dean, Foote rejoined the journalism and mass communication faculty this past August. The first professor on campus to develop an iBook and one of the first to launch a complete course on iTunesU, one of his priorities now is the development of new opportunities for digital student engagement.
Before joining the OU faculty, Foote served as director of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and founding dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He also taught at Cornell University and for a brief time (1979-80) was manager of KGOU.
Foote served as a broadcast journalist in Oklahoma and Washington, D.C. before entering university teaching and administration; press secretary to Speaker of the House Carl Albert; and chief of staff to Congressman Dave McCurdy.
