Lyon College selects King as president

Lyon College in Batesville has hired a new president, the college announced Monday.

W. Joseph “Joey” King, 46, will become the college’s 19th president starting July 1. He is succeeding Donald V. Weatherman, who is retiring at the end of this academic year after leading the college since 2009.

King said he was “honored and humbled” to be the next president of the 681-student college.

“I was very, very excited,” he said about getting the call. “There was never a question in my mind that I wanted to do it. I am interested in private liberal arts education in general.”

A lot of liberal arts colleges “are not healthy — either financially or with their strategy and outlook to the future. With Lyon, they’ve had difficult financial times, but they’re in a good position now,” he said. “They are very much wanting to look forward and be progressive.”

His hire ends a nearly four-month search for the president’s post, said Phil Baldwin, who was the chairman of the presidential search committee. The committee hired Washington-based Academic Search, in part because of senior consultant and former Hendrix College President Ann Die-Hasselmo, he said.

The search brought 100 applicants, which was whittled to 12 who interviewed in Little Rock. The committee selected four finalists and recommended King to the college’s board.

The 32-member board hired King on Thursday, and he met with campus constituents Friday, said Perry Wilson, the board chairman and managing member of the Barber Law Firm in Little Rock.

“Our goal was to find an innovative person who could take Lyon College and its liberal arts mission to the next level,” Wilson said. “He checked all the boxes.”

King’s diverse experiences — he started up two technology-based companies — and his passion for liberal arts education were draws for the search committee, Baldwin said. King, who was the first in his family to go to college, can relate to the changing demographic of colleges and universities, too, he said.

An Aledo, Texas, native, King is coming from Emory & Henry College, a private liberal arts college in Emory, Va., where he works as a senior adviser to the president. He is also leading the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, which helps nearly 140 liberal arts colleges integrate inquiry, pedagogy and technology.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and experimental psychology from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and a doctorate in human-computer interaction from the University of Washington.

He has worked as a research scientist at two laboratories and as a consultant to companies, including Microsoft, Walt Disney Imagineering and Atari Games.

The fiscal problems of private liberal arts colleges, King said, spring from an “irrational exuberance” in the 1990s — an at-the-time seemingly endless enrollment with good returns. But after 9/11 and the recession, the returns have been flat to negative, he said.

As he understands it, King said, Lyon carried a structural deficit, spending more than what they were taking in. Under Weatherman, the college is now “at minimum” stable but “more optimistically” has a positive outlook going forward, King said.

He will also come onto the campus as constituents look to bring Lyon to the next level, Wilson has said. In the last few years, the college has worked to increase its enrollment from 593 students in fall 2012, he said.

“One of the things Lyon wants to do is brand itself on a national level, show the rest of the world what is unique about Lyon College,” Wilson said, pointing out the school’s large first-generation student population, its Scottish heritage and its affiliation with the Presbyterian Church. “One thing I’ve said to people about Lyon is that the hardest part is getting students to come to Batesville, Ark.”

A private college doesn’t need to disclose salary information. Weatherman, the outgoing president, earned $258,568 in total compensation in 2014, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education

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