Business makes new ASU chief a rare bird.

• Position: People - Appalachian State University - Biography

When Ken Peacock began teaching income taxation at Winston-Salem State University in 1973, he wasn't looking for a career in higher education. A tax planner and auditor for one of the big accounting firms, he volunteered to fill in for faculty members who had taken leave to further their educations. Thirty-one years later, he's still in academia but with a new job. Peacock became Appalachian State University's sixth chancellor July 1, succeeding Francis T. Borkowski, who returned to teaching in the School of Music last year.

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Even after more than 20 years as a teacher and administrator at ASU and being nominated by the search committee, Peacock, 56, didn't think he would get the job. Most chancellors come from the arts and sciences faculties. From 1992 to 2003, Peacock was dean of ASU's Walker College of Business, where he had taught since coming to Boone. ASU, founded in 1899 as Watauga Academy, became a teachers college in 1903 and gained university status in 1967. With an enrollment of more than 14,000, sixth largest among the University of North Carolina's 16 campuses, it offers 95 undergraduate and 81 graduate degrees.

A Rocky Mount native, Peacock earned an accounting degree from Mars Hill College in 1970. While with Price Waterhouse in Winston-Salem, he met Tom Taylor, a Wake Forest University accounting professor working at the firm as a faculty intern. Taylor would later become dean of Wake's Calloway School of Business and Accountancy. The Red Oak native encouraged Peacock to pursue an academic career.

"Those Down East folks, as we are called, stick together," Peacock says. Returning to school, he chose Taylor's alma mater, Louisiana State University, and even lived in the same apartment building Taylor had. Grad school gave Peacock a thorough taste of teaching. "Being in the classroom, I thought, 'This is the life for me.'"

After earning his doctorate in accounting in 1979, he taught at the University of Virginia. The opportunity to help start a master's program in tax and auditing brought him to Boone in 1983. In 1987, he became assistant dean of the B-school. As head of its international programs, he developed an exchange program with Fudan University in Shanghai, China, that started in 1995. By that time, he was dean.

In addition to teaching, he held dinners for students, worked with their organizations and formed a dean's council of student advisers. As an administrator, he says, "it's easy for me to...