Lyon College is in the middle of a search for a new leader.
Its president, Donald Weatherman, is retiring at the end of the 2016-17 academic year after leading the private school in Batesville since 2009. The residential, liberal arts college with a Presbyterian affiliation will take nominations, applications and inquiries for the post.
The college has teamed up with an executive search firm, Academic Search, Inc. in Washington, D.C. to find its 18th president. The team will give full consideration to all applications -- a letter of interest, curriculum vitae and references -- received to [email protected] by Sept. 23, according to the school's website.
The school boasts small class sizes, strong student-faculty interactions and a scholarship program that gives financial support to nearly its entire student body.
Weatherman announced his retirement last year at a board meeting so the school would have enough time to find the next leader, according to a news release. He started at the school -- then Arkansas College -- in 1983 as a professor of political philosophy and left some 16 years later to serve as vice president and dean at Erskine College in Due West, S.C.
In 2003, the South Carolina school promoted Weatherman to executive vice president and dean, and in 2009, a search committee for Lyon College unanimously recommended hiring him for the president's job.
In that role, Weatherman endured budget deficits, the need to enroll more students, a student-housing shortage and the destruction of the Edwards Commons dining hall by a fire, Ray LaCroix, the president of LaCroix Optical in Batesville, said in a news release. He turned around an enrollment decline with the largest number of students in the last decade at 716 for Fall 2015, oversaw the construction of two new dormitories and rebuilt a new Edwards Commons, the school said.
Metro on 07/14/2016