If you’re an Ole Miss student and use Twitter on a regular basis, you’ve probably seen the name “David W. Case” attached to a hilarious tweet that has popped up on your timeline.
David Case, Ole Miss alumni and law professor, has spent the past 12 years living his dream and teaching at the University of Mississippi.
“I like lots of places but I really do love this place,” Case said. “I think a lot of students appreciate knowing they have a professor that doesnt just like the place, but considers themselves to be a part of the place.”
Case and his family moved around a lot during the first four years of his life, but he primarily grew up in East Tennessee, right outside of Knoxville. His father was in the Marine Corp and then was a college football coach.
In 1983, Case’s father accepted the defensive coordinator position for the Ole Miss football team, the same time Billy Brewer was head coach for the Rebels. Case was at the University of Richmond at the time but decided to transfer to Ole Miss as a junior with no knowledge of Ole Miss other than it being a part of the Southeastern Conference.
“Given that my father was a football coach, it wasn’t hard for me to fall head over heels in love with the place [Ole Miss] because it was his first really large university coaching job,” Case said. “I kinda dived in with both feet to the Ole Miss experience and was hooked at that point.”
Case spent his remaining two years of undergraduate school earning his bachelor’s degree in English until graduating in 1985. He then decided to apply to the University of Mississippi School of Law.
“I went to law school here not because I wanted to be a lawyer, but because I didn’t want to leave Ole Miss,” he said.
Law school bought Case another three years at the University of Mississippi. Within those three years of law school, Case met his future wife in one of his classes.
Case shares his sense of humor with the Oxford community on Twitter. According to Case, the purpose of Twitter is to express humor and find humor in more serious topics. If Twitter isn’t making him laugh, he’s not enjoying it.
Since attending Ole Miss, Case considers himself a die hard Rebel fan but tries to find the humor in the Rebel’s losses.
“There are many people that take Ole Miss sports very seriously that get offended when I point out the humor in it,” he said. “There are some other fans that turn to humor just like me, and we’re like a tribe. I’ve made some really great connections through Twitter.”
For the first 11 of his 12 years on the faculty at the Ole Miss School of Law, Case commuted to Oxford from his home in Hernando, Mississippi. He spent a lot of time at Hernando’s local Waffle House because there wasn’t much else to do and he genuinely enjoys the food. Naturally, it became one of his twitter bits.
His numerous tweets about Oxford’s lack of a Waffle House received enough retweets to grab the attention of Oxford mayor, Robyn Tannehill. Tannehill followed Case on Twitter and has since been tweeting back and forth with him about a potential Waffle House in Oxford.
“For some reason it got her [Tannehill’s] attention, and she started getting Waffle House’s attention. The whole thing took on a life of its own that was not where I was going with it, but I’m all for it,” Case said.
It looks like something that may be going somewhere; there’s a chance Waffle House will finally open a location in Oxford, Case said.
Case’s hobbies include Ole Miss sports and attending events related to his kids. Now that he lives in Oxford, Case no longer has to drive two hours from Hernando to attend Ole Miss sports events, like soccer or softball.
The Case family is a true Ole Miss family. Three of his four children graduated from Ole Miss. His youngest child is currently a junior at Lafayette High School.
“My youngest has waited 17 years to get to Ole Miss. He’s more of a die hard than all of us. Assuming he graduates from Ole Miss, he’ll be degree number 11 in our family,” he said.
Case considers his professor position at the University of Mississippi School of Law to be his greatest accomplishment so far. He worked incredibly hard to put himself in a position to be competitive in the national hire market. He received another law degree from Columbia University, a PhD from Vanderbilt University and worked at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Case interviewed all over the country and landed at the University of Memphis, which thrilled him because it was the closest law school to Oxford.
“Getting a job at Ole Miss wasn’t even on my radar,” he said. “The planets aligned one day and the Ole Miss law faculty decided they needed to add an environmental law professor to their team and environmental law is my specialty.”
Case plans on retiring in Oxford when he decides to stop teaching at the university’s law school. Case’s in-laws still live in Oxford and he can’t bring himself to leave again.
“It’s very exciting for me to be a professor at a university that’s not just a place that I work,” Case said. “I fell in love with Ole Miss in 1983. This is my university and I’m an Ole Miss Rebel until the day I die. This is the last job I’ll ever have, I’m never leaving this university.”