David Swanson, associate provost and a leading researcher on how the media affects politics, died Monday morning from a heart attack. He was 60 years old.

Swanson’s colleagues remembered him as an excellent administrator whose life was the University.

“He was a person whose life was deeply woven into the fabric of this campus,” said Acting Provost Jesse Delia, who knew Swanson since they were both students at Southern Mississippi University in the mid-1960s.

“He was keenly analytical and able to articulate the values of the faculty and the academic interests of the campus with great cogency and foresight,” Delia said. “He wrote and argued more effectively than anyone we knew here.”

Delia said Swanson used his constant dry wit and an irreverent style to advance causes that he was committed to, including the improvement of student programs.

Swanson also was even-handed in his interactions with people, approaching and talking with his secretaries the same way he would high-level administrators, Delia said.

Student trustee Matt Diller, who worked with Swanson this semester on tuition issues, said the associate provost was easy to get along with.

“You could tell he cared about students, that he wanted to make their education easier for them,” Diller said.

Prior to being named associate provost, Swanson was a professor of speech communication at the University for almost 30 years. From 1994 to 2001, he headed the University’s speech communication department, recruiting 11 of the 27 current faculty members in the department.

One of the recruits, associate professor Dale Brashers, said Swanson “was like a mentor to me.”

“He was a leader in our field, in our discipline of communications,” Brashers said.

Swanson’s research included examining the role of television networks in political coverage and the social and political effects of television news worldwide. In particular, he looked into how the 1991 Gulf War was covered in different countries, according to a University press release.

Brashers described Swanson as a warm and caring person, but at the same time organized and efficient.

“For so many of us he was a leader, a mentor and a friend, and that’s sort of a unique combination, I think,” Brashers said.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Southern Mississippi University, Swanson earned a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Kansas. He is survived by his wife and one daughter.