Dr. Joseph E. Nyre announced that he will be leaving Iona College after eight years as president.

Erin Kutch, who graduated from Iona in 2018, worked directly with Nyre during her time as the president of the Student Government Association. She said that Nyre highly valued student voices.

“The support that Dr. Nyre gave – really gives all students – but gave me one-on-one to do things at Iona I don’t think can be compared to any other president,” Kutch said. “I can’t speak for others, but I never went into a meeting with him not thinking that he didn’t have my back. I think that’s really unique of our president.”

Serving as both SGA president and a representative on College Council during her time at Iona, Kutch said that she interacted with a lot of administrators and served on many committees.

“Not everyone in those rooms is the most open to having students at the table,” Kutch said. “I maybe had to question if other people support me or if other people think I should be in the room, but Dr. Nyre would always let me know what was happening.”

Kutch remembered that Nyre came back from sabbatical in the middle of multiple incidents involving New Rochelle and the area around Iona College.

“Working with him on the back-end and [seeing what] a lot of people didn’t see, I admired his leadership,” she said.

Kutch began working with Nyre her sophomore year when she became a student senator for SGA and interacted with him at multiple town halls. However, she said that she began working very closely with him her senior year as SGA president.

“Everyone can do better, obviously,” she said. “But it’s definitely not one of his shortcomings, his love for students.”

Dr. Christina Carlson began teaching at Iona in 2001, ten years before Nyre came to the school. She said that she highly respects Nyre. When he started at Iona, Nyre inherited a lot of problems from the previous president, such as age discrimination, embezzlement, race discrimination and false reporting for the college’s accreditation.

“To Nyre’s endless credit, six weeks into his tenure here, he discovered the worst of it, didn’t cut and run, which he certainly would have been entitled to do, and he fixed it, which probably saved us,” Carlson said in an email interview. “So on that level there is no comparison. And he has worked hard to build our endowment, which is what allows a college to function properly and responsibly, leaving us in much better shape than he found us.”

Nyre was the first lay, or non-Brother, president of Iona, and Carlson said that while this change probably would have happened anyway, it shifted the identity of the school.

“I do worry about our institutional identity, and not having a Brother as president,” Carlson said. “Again, this is not unique to us–Catholic education is changing, Catholic identity is changing, and it’s foolish to think otherwise. But I do feel like we have lost something intangible in terms of our unique identity.”

Carlson said that she does not like some of the decisions made by the college in recent years, but is unsure how many of those things have to do with decisions from the top, or with a changing higher education culture.

“This is to take nothing away from the fact that the previous administration, whatever loyalty it might have inspired, put us in peril through illegal activities,” Carlson said. “Nyre cleaned that mess up, which he didn’t have to, so I will always appreciate his integrity and willingness to see a project through.”