Dennis M. Hanno

He is an occasional contributor to The Washington Post. He also serves as a commissioner of the New England Commission on Higher Education, a three-year term that began in 2019.

Dennis M. Hanno (born 1955) is the former president of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. He was appointed on February 22, 2014 as the college's eighth president, succeeding Ronald Crutcher, who retired in June 2014. He ended his tenure as president on December 31, 2021.

Hanno was appointed as president of Wheaton College on February 22, 2014 and was officially welcomed to the Wheaton community during a ceremony held February 25, 2014. He took office on July 15, 2014 as the college’s eighth president over its 180 years of history.

In 2006, he joined the staff at Babson College, as a President’s Endowed Professor of accounting and dean of the undergraduate school. Hanno helped establish and became the first director of the Babson Entrepreneurial Leadership Academy, a program that works with high school students in other countries to help them develop leadership skills and encourage entrepreneurial ideas. In September 2010, he helped found the Babson-Rwanda Entrepreneurship Center in Kigali, Rwanda and became its executive director. In 2012, Hanno was appointed as murata dean of the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and vice provost of Babson College, and in 2013 he was promoted to provost and senior vice president of the college.

Before beginning his career in higher education, Hanno worked as a certified public accountant in New York and Massachusetts, founding and running his own firm in Lowville, New York from 1982 to 1985. In 1990, he became an assistant professor of accounting at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, where he worked until 1992. From 1992-2006, Hanno worked at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management where he taught as an associate and assistant professor of accounting and served as associate dean for undergraduate matters.

Hanno grew up in a small town in upstate New York and attended the University of Notre Dame where he studied accountancy. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1977 with a Bachelor of Business Administration. He attended graduate school at Western New England University where he earned a Master of Science in Accounting in 1981. He then attended the Isenberg School of Management at University of Massachusetts Amherst where he studied accounting and psychology and obtained a PhD in Management in 1990.