2023

Chief Business Officer & Treasurer Kent Dyer to Retire After 36 Years

Dyer, who joined the College in 1987, will depart in mid-July.

By: Meghan Kita  Tuesday, June 6, 2023 09:33 AM

Photo by Paul Pearson

When Chief Business Officer & Treasurer Kent Dyer joined Muhlenberg in 1987 as the assistant treasurer/director of budget, “Trexler Library was just a hole in the ground,” he says. Over the last three-and-a-half decades, Dyer has watched the campus evolve and modernize — and, since capital projects were added to his responsibilities in the year 2000, he has had a direct role in overseeing many of these changes.

Before joining Muhlenberg, Dyer worked at an accounting firm in Philadelphia, where the College was one of his clients. There, he had a busy season lasting from January through June. He traveled frequently and recalls rushing home from New York City when his wife went into labor with his first son. (“I got home in time,” he adds.) 

Trying to balance parenting with work travel and long hours wore on Dyer, and he decided to make the move to Muhlenberg. The 45-mile commute each way from his home in Glenside, Pennsylvania, was still preferable to the alternative, and “it seemed like a great place,” he says.

His impressions were correct, and he stayed at Muhlenberg, earning a promotion to his current role in 1998. As part of senior staff, he oversaw the business office, the mailroom, the print shop and the technology office (which was under his purview until the first chief information officer was hired in 2015). After the December 1999 retirement of then-Vice President James Steffy, Dyer began overseeing facilities and capital projects. In the summer of 2002, Dyer briefly served as the College’s acting president during a leadership transition. In 2004, he began overseeing human resources, and in 2015 he picked up the ’Berg Bookshop as well.

Dyer says that the last few years have been the most challenging of his long career due to the pandemic and its effects on the College. He didn’t like working from home and was back on campus as soon as he was allowed: “Our facilities people, during Covid, they had to be here every day, and I felt I should be here with them too.”

Dyer with sons Joseph '10 and John '07 at Commencement in 2010

Both of Dyer’s sons graduated from Muhlenberg (John in 2007, Joseph in 2010), as did his now daughter-in-law Cecilia de Souza-Dyer ’10. Dyer’s primary goal for retirement is to spend more time with his three grandchildren, an 8-year-old and two 4-year-olds. He will remain at Muhlenberg until mid-July to assist during the first month of new Chief Financial Officer Curtis Topper's time with the College.

When Dyer reflects on what kept him at Muhlenberg for so long, it wasn’t the tuition benefits for his kids nor the gym he frequented on his lunch breaks, though both were nice perks. It was his coworkers: “You’re going to work with people you like,” he says. “It’s been a blast. It’s been a great ride.”