Skateboarding Professor

About

Skateboarding Professor, sometimes seen as Skating Professor, is an advice animal-style image macro series that uses a photo of University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Tom Winter riding his skateboard between classes. Typical captions relate to skating culture or characterize the professor as having a hip persona.

Origin

Redditor Tr0llzor^[1] posted a photo to the pics subreddit^[2] on April 4th, 2012 of Doctor Thomas Winter, a professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln who became notorious for getting around the campus with a skateboard. The post hit the front page with 31,534 upvotes and 2521 points overall.

Later that day, an image macro featuring the photo titled “Hip Professor Harold”^[3] was posted to the Advice Animals subreddit, but only received 6 points. On April 5th, another image macro of the professor was posted^[4] with a caption referencing a skateboarding trick known as a manual.^[5] This post received 6674 upvotes and 1319 points overall.

Thomas Winter

Doctor Thomas Winter, who is currently a classics and religious studies professor, has been teaching since 1970.^[7] He has been skateboarding around the campus since 1993, when he made the conscious effort to lead a more active life.^[6] In 2008, Winter was profiled by the Daily Nebraskan^[6] in which he called himself a “role model” for students who see him skating at age of 62. On Rate My Professors^[8], Winter has an overall score of 3.3 out of 5.

Spread

On April 6th, a series of the image macros was posted to Skateboarding Magazine^[14] and the Pleated Jeans^[13] Tumblr, where it received over 14,000 notes in three days. The next day, Dr. Winter was featured on Yahoo! News^[11] and Mashable.^[12] On April 8th, Skateboarding Professor appeared on FunnyJunk^[10] and Digital Journal.^[15]

As of April 9th, 2012, the Quickmeme^[9] page has over 500 instances.

Notable Examples

External References