Meet the Speaker: Nathan Hatch

Dr. Nathan O. Hatch became Wake Forest’s 13th president on July 1, 2005, and retired on June 30, 2021. While at the helm, U.S. News and World Report named Wake Forest 23rd among 281 national universities – the highest ever ranking for the University.

He and his wife, Julie, a former public school teacher, have three children: Gregg, a 1997 graduate of Notre Dame, works in residential real estate in Seattle, WA; David, a 2000 Notre Dame graduate, received an MBA degree from Duke University in 2007 and works in finance in Charlotte, NC; and Beth, a 2007 graduate of Notre Dame, who earned her Master of Divinity at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C. in 2015. The Hatches also have eight grandchildren.

Dr. Hatch grew up in Columbia, S.C., where his father was a Presbyterian minister. A graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, he received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities. He joined the faculty at Notre Dame in 1975. He was named provost, the university’s second highest-ranking position, in 1996; a Presbyterian, he was the first Protestant to ever serve in that position at Notre Dame.

After he retired as president of Wake Forest, Dr. Hatch continued to add his scholarship and experience to the higher education landscape. In addition to serving on several nonprofit boards, Hatch served on the Notre Dame Board of Trustees and the Fuller Seminary Board of Trustees. Because of his love for good leadership, he wrote a book, The Gift of Transformative Leaders, published by Cambridge University Press, which profiled a series of leaders he worked with and examined their individual leadership styles which led to their success.