Former president of Lyon College dies at 81

Lyon College President Emeritus Walter Barackman Roettger died Sunday in Syracuse, N.Y., the college confirmed Monday.

Roettger, 81, served as the 16th president of Lyon College, from 1998 to 2009. The cause of death was unknown.

During his time as president, Lyon College opened the 60,854-square-foot Derby Center for Science and Mathematics, an $11 million facility, in 2003.

“I’ll leave here with the satisfaction of watching one of the finest undergraduate science facilities in the nation be built here,” Roettger told the Arkansas DemocratGazette in a 2009 interview.

In 2001, U. S. News and World Report recognized Lyon College for the first time as one of America’s “Best Liberal-Arts Colleges.”

And in 2008, Lyon College provided each student with a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop computer, the first school in the state and one of about 200 nationally that provided students with laptops.

“We know that this technology promotes learning and that computer proficiency is important to success after graduation,” he said in 2008. “Lyon has invested heavily in information technology over the past decade, becoming one of the first fully wireless campuses in the state. … Thanks to our technology infrastructure, we’re now able to take this next step.”

Also during his time as president, the college developed agreements with area community colleges that made it possible for students at those institutions to attend Lyon.

Skip Rutherford, a Batesville native who taught the occasional class at Lyon College, remembered Roettger on Twitter on Monday, noting: “During his 11 years, Lyon faculty were named Arkansas Professors of the Year 9 times.”

The Professor of the Year program is affiliated with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Support and Advancement of Education.

Roettger, like Rutherford, taught the occasional class, which he said gave him a good perspective and a chance to engage with students and professors.

After he retired as Lyon president, Roettger provided interim leadership to at least five institutions around the nation, including a 2016 appointment at the State University of New York-Oswego, where he was acting provost and vice president for academic affairs, and a 2019 appointment as interim provost at Glasgow Caledonian New York College in New York City.

Before Lyon, he worked in various administrative jobs, including Westminster College in Fulton, Mo.; Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I.; and the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Conn. As a professor, Roettger was first tenured at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he received the Honor Teacher Award.

Roettger was born in Champaign, Ill. His father, Walter Henry Roettger, was a major league baseball player from 1927-1934 for the St. Louis Cardinals, New York Giants, Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates, and later served as the head baseball coach for 17 seasons at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was also an associate professor, according to the Society For American Baseball Research biography project. His mother, Marjorie Barackman of Streator, Ill., had worked as a bookkeeper at a bank.