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Former WFU president Hearn dies at 71
Journal file photo by David Rolfe
Wake Forest University president Thomas Hearn listening to Murray Greason describing Hearn's accomplishments during commencement ceremonies at the university on May 16, 2005.
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Published: August 18, 2008
Thomas K. Hearn, who served as Wake Forest University president from 1983 to 2005, died today. He was 71.
Hearn was the university's 12th president, and the second-longest serving one in its history. He was succeeded by Nathan Hatch, who praised Hearn's leadership.
"He served 22 years with great vision and integrity, and all who love Wake Forest are grateful for his legacy of achievement and the place the institution holds in American higher education," Hatch said today.
Hearn oversaw the rise of Wake Forest from a regional institution to one with a national reputation, and he pushed for stronger economic ties between the university and the city.
Three years into his arrival from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1983, Hearn negotiated WFU's split with the State Baptist Convention, allowing the university to appoint its own trustees and giving up the group's financial support.
During his presidency, Wake Forest saw college applications double, hired significantly more faculty, hosted presidential debates in 2000 and 1988, and the college launched an extensive construction and renovation initiative on campus.
He also came with a reputation for reaching out to the world beyond academe. The city's economic doldrums would push Hearn into a more visible role than any Wake Forest president before him.
"I've heard people say Wake Forest had a saving touch when it moved here 50 years ago," Hearn told a Winston-Salem Journal reporter in 2006, on the 50th anniversary of the school's move to Winston-Salem, "but it really wasn't ready to undertake that role until I came here."
Hearn is credited with, in particular, his help in starting Winston-Salem Business Inc. A private-business group, it was focused on recruiting jobs and companies in the wake of the Reynolds buyout and other economic changes. The group helped lure Dell Inc. to Forsyth County. Hearn was the group's chairman during its first three years.
"From one perspective, the success of our economic founding fathers was our undoing. Our economic plight developed over many years, and it is naive to imagine that it will be rapidly solved," Hearn wrote in a guest column in the Journal in 1990.
In late 2003, he took a leave of absence from his job while he battled brain cancer. He returned to the job a few months later, but announced that he planned to retire in June 2005.
A memorial service is expected to be held later this week.
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