Taverner to remain as Lyon’s president
Board backs her after interim stint
Melissa Taverner will continue on as president of Lyon College after a unanimous vote by the school’s board of trustees, the college announced Friday.
Taverner became interim president last August after joining the college as provost and dean of faculty in 2017. Since 2018, she has worked with the faculty at the Batesville campus on various initiatives, the college said.
The private liberal arts college, founded in 1872, has seen a recent enrollment slide, and last year announced discussions with the University of the Ozarks about possibly pooling some operations in response to an expected decline in the population of potential students.
Lyon College and the University of the Ozarks, which is located roughly 140 miles away in Clarksville, are both Presbyterian-affiliated schools. No further announcements have been made by the two schools. Lyon College enrolled 581 students this past fall, down about 12% from a year earlier, according to state data.
The college’s previous president, Joseph King, resigned last August after the Batesville mayor and a county judge signed onto an open letter asking that King be fired over remarks made to a reporter with the Chronicle of Higher Education.
King had called the college a bubble “of inclusion and of diversity surrounded by a sea of angry, disenfranchised populations and a large white-supremacist population,” according to an article published July 26, 2021.
The elected officials in their letter — joined by a chamber of commerce leader — stated that King’s “inaccurate portrayal of the community” resulted in “shattered confidence in his ability” to lead the college.
Taverner, before joining Lyon College, worked for 22 years at Emory & Henry College in Virginia, where she was an associate professor of biology and held various academic leadership positions.
Taverner, 60, earned a doctoral degree in environmental science from the University of Virginia, a master’s degree in virology from the University of Reading — located in the United Kingdom — and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, a school in Lynchburg, Va., now known as Randolph College.
“I’ve had the pleasure of working with exceptional faculty, staff and students at Lyon during my time as Provost, and I’m excited to collaborate with them in this new role as we work toward not only preserving the Lyon legacy but also ensuring the College’s bright future,” Taverner said in a statement.
Taverner was unavailable Friday for a phone interview, a spokeswoman said.
In 2018, Taverner told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that she moved to Arkansas from a rural area in Virginia with her husband, David.
“My husband and I for the past 23 years lived in the country because we had small children. When we came here, we made the decision to be in town. We walk to church. We walk to eat breakfast, walk to the library. That’s wonderful. I forgot what that was like. You also feel like you are part of this vibrant community,” Taverner said.
In the 2018 interview, she also discussed the relationship between Lyon College and the surrounding community.
“Lyon most definitely wants to be a supportive force for the community, and I think the community says we want to support the college,” Taverner said.
In 2019, Taverner, as Lyon College provost, earned $135,806, according to the college’s 2019 IRS return filed in May of last year. For the same year, King, as Lyon College president, earned $222,194.
Taverner is the first woman to serve as president of the college in a non-interim role, said Brooks Blevins, a history professor at Missouri State University who has written a book about the history of Lyon College. Blevins, a graduate of Lyon College, said Ruth Schmidt served as interim president for six months in 1998.