A new era is set to begin at William Carey University, as the school’s board of trustees announced on June 21 that Ben Burnett will take over as president for Tommy King, who has decided to retire after a 15-year stint as president.
Burnett, who currently serves as executive vice president of the university, will serve as its 10th president. He will assume those duties on Aug. 16.
A public reception honoring King and his wife Sandra – also a William Carey graduate – will be held from 4:30-6 p.m. July 28 in the King Student Center on the Hattiesburg campus. Inauguration ceremonies for Burnett are expected later this fall.
“First of all, it’s very humbling and I’m very blessed, because I feel like I have been around so many great people in the last 36 years of education that helped prepare me for today,” Burnett said. “So I’m thankful for all the former students and parents and teachers I’ve worked with, because I truly feel like all 36 years have gone together to prepare me to make this move.
“I’m appreciative and thankful to the board of trustees, and also very grateful to Dr. King for his vision for the university, but also for him to bring me to William Carey eight years ago from my role as superintendent (at the Lamar County School District). Without Dr. King, none of this would be possible.”
Burnett’s 36 years of experience in the field of education stretches back to 1986, when he served as assistant band director for Meridian High School. Two years later, he returned to his alma mater, Oak Grove High School, to become band director there.
While under Burnett’s leadership, the Oak Grove band consistently rated superior and grew from 50 members to more than 220. Burnett has served as president of the Mississippi Bandmasters and was the recipient of the A.E. McClain Outstanding Young Band Director award, and was inducted into the Southeast Mississippi Band Directors’ Association Hall of Fame in 2013.
In 1997, Burnett began a 10-year stint as principal of Oak Grove Middle School, during which time he also was president of the Mississippi Association of Middle Level Education and Mississippi’s Middle School Principal of the Year.
In August 2007, Burnett was elected as superintendent of the Lamar County School District, a position he was re-elected to four years later. While he was at that position, the school district was rated an “A” school district by the Mississippi Department of Education, and received state and federal grants for early childhood, school safety, dyslexia training and after-school tutoring.
Burnett retired in 2014, but soon after accepted the position of dean of the William Carey University School of Education. He was named executive vice president in April 2020.
“I do (feel like my background has prepared me for this), and Dr. King and I had a similar pathway coming to Carey,” Burnett said. “We were both K-12 school administrators, and we both retired from K-12 after 28 years, so his preparation coming here 23 years ago was similar to mine.
“I want to be real clear – I don’t see myself as filling his shoes, but walking alongside of those and adding to his accomplishments. But then also I want to bring my own thoughts and ideas to the position.”
Burnett certainly knows the challenges going into the position, especially with demographic changes across the country seeing less students graduating from high school over the next five to ten years.
“So higher education institutions are going to be challenged to just continue as they have,” he said. “Then with the advent of COVID, higher education has changed – it’s become more flexible, and in a good way, we’re trying to meet the needs of the students more.
“So my challenge will be not to just maintain the momentum we have, but to create even better momentum given these challenges.”
In addition, Burnett plans to market the university on a national platform.
“I think we’re fairly well-known regionally, but we want to carry the William Carey name to everybody across the country,” he said. “We have a huge alumni base, not just in Mississippi, but we graduate between 1,000 and 1,200 students every summer.
“So we’ve got a huge number of graduates out there that we want to pay attention to, and we want our alumni base to grow. But we also want them to support the university by helping us recruit students across the country, and to share their experiences with them.”
All in all, including his stint as president, King – who was the first graduate to serve in that role – has spent almost six decades on the Carey campus. That includes as a campus leader while a student, as a Carey trustee, adjunct professor, department chair and executive vice president.
“I had my 81st birthday last week,” King said. “Anybody should be able to take a rest (and retire) when they reach 81 years of age.
“But it takes a team to accomplish anything, and I don’t accept the full credit alone. I had a lot of helpers joining hands and working to achieve what we did.”
One of King’s first major challenges as president came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrin, which destroyed the university’s first Gulf Coast campus. After that, he chose the location and developed the construction of the new Tradition campus on the Gulf Coast.
“My first task was to find a location to build the Coast campus, and so we surveyed maybe 20 sites along the Coast and finally settled on the Tradition development,” King said. “We were the first major (entity) to locate in Tradition.”
During that time, the university applied to open the WCU College of Osteopathic Medicine, which admitted its first class in 2010 at the Hattiesburg campus.
“This fall, it will become the largest medical school in the state of Mississippi,” King said. “There was a great need because of a shortage of healthcare workers; Mississippi has the lowest per capita healthcare workers in the country.
“So it was only natural for us to step in and try to help alleviate that shortage. Looking out where the need exists and finding that healthcare was a major need in our area, and designing plans to meet that need has allowed us to grow and prosper.”
Another challenge came in January 2017, when an EF-3 tornado tore through Hattiesburg and Petal and wreaked havoc on the Hattiesburg campus, destroying six buildings and leaving only one untouched. One of the destroyed buildings was the original Tatum Court, for which King led the rebuilding effort and cut the ribbon on the restored Tatum Court in July 2019.
King was instrumental in establishing the School of Pharmacy at the Tradition campus, a physical therapy doctoral program in Hattiesburg, and a new nursing school in Baton Rouge. He also led the way to the construction of a new 67,000-square-foot facility for the College of Health Sciences – the largest complex WCU has ever built. The most recent ribbon-cutting was for the King Student Center, named in honor of King and his wife, Sandra.
Also During King’s tenure, the university saw unprecedented growth in enrollment, with the number of students more than doubling from 2,500 to more than 5,200. During the same time, the number of residential students in Hattiesburg has increased four-fold and six new dorms have been opened.
“I’m very proud of the growth in enrollment, especially in light of the fact that so many of our sister colleges are actually declining in enrollment,” King said. “We live in a part of the country where the college-age population is declining, and we still are growing, and that’s a big, big accomplishment.
“I’m really proud of the fact that the Gulf Coast campus has hit a record enrollment, and it’s continuing to grow, and that’s where the pharmacy school is.”
King also made note of the number of students who attend chapel; when he became president, approximately 150 students participated in that endeavor weekly. That number was that low, King said, because that activity didn’t seem to be that important to students.
“But we started emphasizing chapel, and chapel is primarily for undergraduate students, so we started pushing it,” King said. “Just before the COVID crisis, we were having between 800 and 900 students attend chapel, which reflects a turnaround in the spiritual interest on campus.
“That, to me, is a big, big accomplishment as well.”
As far as plans for retirement, King hasn’t quite worked that out yet.
“For the first month or so, I’ll just kick up my feet and relax and catch up on rest,” he said. “Then I’ll look around some and see.
“I’d like to continue helping the college on a limited basis, if possible. I don’t know how that will work out, but that’s part of the plan.”
