Former colleagues remember Lyons

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MAINE – Charlie Lyons passed away recently after a battle with cancer. He was the eighth president of the University of Maine at Fort Kent, serving from 1996 to 2001. Employees past and present have fond memories of working with him during his tenure in Fort Kent.

DR. CHARLES LYONS

Under Lyons’ direction, enrollment at UMFK saw unprecedented growth, especially in the area of diversity. In A Century and a Quarter of Progress, A Look at the First 125 Years of the St. John Valley’s Institution of Higher Learning, it states that the Chronicle of Higher Education ranked UMFK seventh in the nation for foreign student enrollment near the end of 2001.

A university press release states, “He was instrumental in establishing the Elmer Violette Wilderness Camp, which was built in the late 1990s, and is credited with fighting for the funding of a new classroom building, which resulted in the construction of Nadeau Hall in 2002.”

Lyons left UMFK to become the President of the University of Maine at Augusta, where he helped that institution grow from a two-year college to a four-year college, and following that success, moved to York Community College, completing a 17-year career as the head of several of Maine’s institutions of higher learning.

In 1998, under Lyon’s leadership, Jason Parent, currently The Aroostook Medical Center’s director of advancement, became UMFK’s director of university relations and alumni affairs three weeks after the school hired him. He considers Lyons to have been one of his most influential supporters.

Parent said, “I really saw Charlie as a visionary and one of the great mentors in my career.”

Parent described an incident that occurred recently, one of only two incidences in which Lyon’s mentorship included a caution against his chosen course of action. Parent had just acquired approval from the Governor for state funding for the World Acadian Congress and was publishing a press release about that information.

Lyons called him to advise him against that action, cautioning that it was political suicide to publish a press release from the Governor’s office before that office published it. Parent chose to go ahead with his decision anyway out of a desire to keep the people of the St. John Valley informed, but sees Lyon’s contact as one of many ways in which his mentor continue to “look out” for him.

“He was just such a pleasure to work for,” said Parent.

Parent shared that during Lyons’ tenure at UMFK, people who worked with him joked that his unofficial motto was “Ready, Fire, Aim”.

“He was always moving at the speed of light,” he said. “He was just such a powerful leader and a force to be reckoned with. He could walk into a room and he would own that room. He did it effortlessly.”

“He was a great man,” said Parent.

Another UMFK employee who served with Lyons is John Murphy, UMFK’s vice president of administration.

Murphy described Lyons as a jolly, smiling, popular, and well-respected man, someone who everyone in the community as well as the faculty and staff liked.

His early morning unanticipated office visits helped him to “keep his finger on the pulse of the campus,” said Murphy, as did his emphasis on the students. He had an open-door policy for the students that sometimes trumped the same schedule for staff and faculty.

Murphy said, “He was unique as a president.”

In an email correspondence to faculty and staff on August 23, President Wilson G. Hess invited the campus community to observe a time of silence and to share remembrances of Lyons during Campus Development Day on August 29.