t-pain-prez-shirtT.K. Wetherell, Florida State’s outgoing president, contributed his fair share of cheating scandals accomplishments—and one funny faux pas—to the former Florida State College for Women during his tenure, and generally kept things harmonious in Tallahassee.

But if a coalition of students gets their way, his successor might be singing a different tune. Like, say, Auto-Tune.

This is the what the “T-Pain Killa Cam-Pain,” two weeks old and thriving on their own website, Facebook, and Twitter. I hollered at Justin de la Cruz, FSU graduate student and Head Killa Cam-Pain Manager, via email.

“I started the Cam-Pain with a single Twitter post,” de la Cruz wrote. “I just thought ‘T.K.’s leaving… why not get T-Pain? It’s practically the same name, but T-Pain is much, much more popular.’

“Weeks later, when a friend of mine threw a themed rock star party, I deemed it an appropriate time for the unveiling of my shirt idea, and that’s what got the ball rolling.”

FSU could, if it wanted celebrities, tab anyone from Burt Reynolds to Creed frontman Scott Stapp, but T-Pain’s different, according to de la Cruz.

“The cool thing is that T-Pain is a great businessman — he has successfully popularized both a movement in the hip-hop realm (the use of auto-tune) and in the parody realm (e.g., “I’m On A Boat”). When is the last time someone got famous for doing something seriously, then got famous for making fun of himself doing that same thing, and then kept both branches of his popularity afloat?”

Their efforts are easy to dismiss as a lark, de la Cruz insists there’s some method to the madness.

“We do mean to be taken seriously. We want students to start thinking about this process of choosing a new university president. When I was an undergraduate, I didn’t really care about who was president, but now I see how much impact the person in the top office can have.”

It’s gaining momentum, too. “The real explosion in numbers,” de la Cruz reports, “happened on Wednesday, August 5, when we received coverage from the Tallahassee Democrat, the Orlando Sentinel, local news stations WTLH and WCTV, and Fark. On that Wednesday, we went from just under 200 people in the early morning to just under 1,000 people just before midnight.”

“I’ve been wearing the shirt around town and I’ve only been getting positive reactions,” de la Cruz reports. “I’ve personally only heard one negative reaction from a younger person, through a message on Facebook, and I’m pretty sure he was just a robot.”

And T-Pain himself has blessed this movement on Twitter. So it’s probably time to start treating the meeting between Bobby Bowden and his new boss Faheem Najm as an inevitability, right?

“I imagine them sipping iced tea on Bobby’s back porch, discussing everything from politics to the weather,” de la Cruz writes. “Mrs. Bowden brings out a plate of lemon bars, and the two men have a relaxing snack and play a game of Scrabble to wind down the evening.”

Even if it doesn’t work out, it’s a tutorial on how ideas go viral: “The real fun was seeing an original idea of mine spread like wildfire through the things I use everyday — through Twitter, Facebook, blogs. This is really what Web 2.0 is all about: connecting people and ideas.”

And if it does? De la Cruz reports that a UF member of the Cam-Pain is scheming to put Tom Petty up for the AD role in Gainesville, filled admirably for so many years by Jeremy Foley.

I think we’ll leave the free-falling to the Seminoles’ football team.

Follow the Cam-Pain on Twitter with this hashtag: #tpain4FSUprez.