Brevard College

Dr. Joshua Wilkey is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and holds a faculty appointment in the College’s Business & Organizational Leadership Program. A native of Western North Carolina, Dr. Wilkey holds a BS and an MA in History from Western Carolina University and a Doctorate in Higher Education Leadership from the University of Alabama. 

Valuing the richness that Division III Athletics brings to the Brevard College campus community, Dr. Wilkey is excited to serve our student-athletes and faculty in his role as Faculty Athletics Representative. Dr. Wilkey regularly teaches and interacts with student athletes, helping them navigate academic challenges and find workable solutions that help them embrace their dual identities as scholar-athletes. 

Dr. Wilkey sees intercollegiate athletics as one of the single greatest opportunities for equity within higher education, providing a pathway to a baccalaureate-level education for those with athletic talent and potentially as-yet-untapped intellectual ability. Over the years, he has had the immense privilege of working with first-year student athletes struggling to find their place in the world, watching them excel both in their sport and in the classroom, then head across the graduation stage to go out and change the world, having had a robust educational experience made all the more meaningful by their participation in a sport they love. 

While not an intercollegiate athlete himself, Dr. Wilkey grew up playing baseball, and he was an Atlanta Braves fan all the way back in the Dale Murphy days when it wasn’t particularly cool to be a Braves fan. He spent most of his summer evenings parked in front of an AM radio listening to Chip Caray and Pete Van Wieren announce Braves games, an experience that forever endeared him to the power of sports as a way of thinking about the potential of the world outside his hometown and impoverished upbringing. 

Later in life, Dr. Wilkey went to work at a local radio station in his hometown, working both as a sales representative and announcer, spending two seasons as the color commentator for Pisgah High School Black Bear football. Eventually, before he found his way to higher education, Dr. Wilkey owned and operated small-market radio stations in Tennessee and Kentucky, often pitching in as color commentator for high school football and paying the royalties to carry the Braves games in Kentucky even though everyone else in town was a Cincinnati Reds fan. 

Dr. Wilkey did not have the opportunity to attend college until he was 31, but quickly realized once he entered college that he would likely never exit. He first came to work at Brevard College as an adjunct history instructor, and has held a variety of faculty and administrative positions during his tenure with the College. 

His office door is always open for student athletes, whether they need to talk through academic concerns, or just grab a cup of coffee, a protein bar, or a piece of chocolate.