Dr. Kyle Carter has been Western Carolina University’s Provost since November of 2004.
He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer University in psychology and went on to study educational psychology receiving his MA and PhD. from the University of Georgia. He has spent thirteen years directly in the classroom and has held administration positions at the University of Missouri and was previously the provost at the University of Northern Colorado.
Dr. Carter’s position as Provost consists of three major areas of supervision. He collaborates with all the Deans and supervises curriculum where he can rapidly enact program change and academic standards. He supervises enrollment management and oversees the process of admissions to graduation and lastly, he works with information technology in networking.
Dr. Carter spends about forty to fifty percent of his time engaged in these three major areas, often in the form of meetings. The remaining time he spends working with department heads in management and strategically planning future programs. He is very busy and compares his job to that of a firefighter, commenting, “I put out a lot of fires.”
Dr. Carter is very happy with his position as Provost and he considers there to be many advantages to it. He considers working with others in creating exciting educational opportunities for students to be the biggest advantage and his number one motivator.
He also likes the fact that he has the opportunity to affect change fairly quickly to enhance the educational experiences of students. Though he is very pleased with his job, Dr. Carter wishes he could spend more time interacting with students instead of spending so much time in meetings and writing papers.
In his free time, Dr. Carter enjoys doing many things. He likes to golf, hike, and go trout fishing, a hobby he picked up in Colorado. He enjoys spending time with his family and often visits his children in Atlanta and New York. When he is at home, he enjoys watching the mountains with his wife and walking their yellow lab named Dooley.
Dr. Carter also reads mystery, spy and escape novels, as well as nonfiction in his spare time.
