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Greetings, I'm Nathan Hatch
and I want to welcome
all of you students and the entire Wake Forest community back for a new
term.
One thing that's great about academic life at least twice a year
we get to start over.
None of you yet has gotten anything less than an A in a class
for the spring term.
Wonderful that we can
start afresh and I wish you well as you undertake a new set of courses and are
engaged in a new set of
projects across this campus.
I hope you and your families had a wonderful holiday. The Hatches certainly
did. We had in all our children and grandchildren.
One of the things I've done, did it for the second year, is set up an electric
train for our grandchildren.
That's been fun, I sort of returned my own boyhood where I enjoyed
an electric train. We had a marvelous
time and I'm really engaged for the new term, which has the number of exciting
things.
Within a few weeks, we will be naming a new provost, the chief academic officer for
Wake Forest.
I and a faculty committee have been serious at work on this during the fall
and are close to naming someone. We've had wonderful candidates and the great thing
about that is they
really identify with our core mission here of having excellence but
having very student centered
education.
Another thing that's happening in april is a wonderful conference call
"Rethinking Success"
from liberal arts to careers in the 21st century.
Condoleeza Rice, the former Secretary of State,
will be the keynote speaker.
And we are attempting to address the important issue of how do people study
the liberal arts which are so important but then how do they address a world of
work in a time when
that's a challenging situation for all graduates.
The last thing I'll mention
is that
this spring we open a new center in Charlotte. This has been,
the lead on this has been our business school which will offer a variety of
programs there,
but it's also interesting because it's one block from the convention center where
the Democratic Convention will be held right after Labor Day
Wake Forest hopes to be able to use that in creative ways
as the political nation of the United States really, the Democrats at
least, descend upon Charlotte.
And we will have the opportunity to have
conversations and other engagements at that center.
Welcome back to Wake Forest and I wish all of you the most of prosperous term. Thanks!