UPDATE, Aug. 25, 2021, 10:20 p.m.: This story has been updated to include a recently released letter from Lyon College faculty regarding Dr. King’s statements. Scroll below to read.
Also, the board of trustees is scheduled to meet tomorrow, Thursday, Aug. 26, at 4 p.m.
The editor of a Washington, D.C.-based newspaper and website has released a statement that disputes Lyon College President Dr. W. Joseph King’s assertion he was misquoted in an article the paper published.
In a July 26 piece from the “The Chronicle of Higher Education” entitled “Could Political Rhetoric Turn into Campus Violence?”, the article’s author, Alexander C. Kafka, quoted King as saying Lyon has had to deal with active Klan chapters in the Batesville area and that the Batesville-based school is surrounded by an “angry, disenfranchised” population with “a large white-supremacist population.”
The article also featured King describing an alleged November 2020 rally at Lyon in support of President Donald Trump that King said drew “thousands of people” to Batesville, some of which had confederate flags and neo-Nazi symbols. The article quoted King telling Kafka of the rally crowd: “Think Capitol mob minus the ‘QAnon Shaman.’”
Screenshot via Shannon Haney
In a statement posted on the Lyon College website Aug. 21, King said he was misquoted regarding the event.
“This did not happen, and my staff and I are working with the article’s author to issue a correction,” King said in the statement. “I apologize for this error.”
Shannon Haney, a blogger who first brought attention to King’s comments, reached out to Kafka to confirm the quotes. Brock Read, The Chronicle’s editor, responded in an Aug. 24 email noting the Chronicle’s Intelligence Department reviewed the correspondence between Kafka and Dr. King and found that President King was not misquoted.
King’s statement claiming he was misquoted was released almost a month after the article’s July 26 publication in The Chronicle, and a day after Haney’s initial post, “Is Joey King OK?”, was published. (Click here for that article from Haney.)
Read also attached a statement to his Tuesday email that noted Kafka sent President King draft language for the report on May 24, 2021, asking him to confirm that it accurately reflected his thinking.
In response to the draft, King asked Kafka to clarify two minor points in the piece. Kafka amended the draft wording to clarify both points. He then shared the revised language with President King, who replied by email that the revised wording “looks good to me.”
According to The Chronicle, King emailed Kafka on Aug. 22, stating he (King) made a mistake in not reviewing the final accuracy check more “thoroughly.” The statement quotes King writing in his Aug. 22 email:
“I did it on my phone, and I missed the part about the Trump rally. We were afraid that that was going to happen in Batesville and had prepared as I discussed. However, it ended up happening in another town in the Ozarks.”
The Chronicle did update the article regarding King’s comments concerning the alleged Trump rally. The new paragraph reads:
A letter from Lyon College Faculty, released Wednesday:
For more on this story from White River Now, click here.
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