Nathan Dougherty graduated from UT in 1909 in civil engineering and received the degrees of CE (civil engineering) and MCE (master’s in civil engineering) from Cornell University in 1913 and 1914, respectively, while serving as an instructor in civil engineering at Cornell. He left Cornell for the faculty of George Washington University in 1914 and then left to be head of the Civil Engineering Department at UT in 1916. He served as department head until being named dean in 1940. He served as dean of engineering from 1940 to 1956 and retired at the mandatory retirement age of 70.
While a student at UT, Dougherty was captain of three sports in his senior year—football, basketball, and track—and was named All-Southern guard on the Grantland Rice-Heisman mythical team. A six-foot two-inch, 185-pound guard, Dougherty was nicknamed “the big one.”
He was president of the American Society of Engineering Education 1954–55 and was chairman of the UT Athletics Board from 1917 until he retired in 1956. In 1958 he was made an honorary member of the American Society of Engineering Education, the third person so designated by ASEE, and he accepted the honor along with President Dwight Eisenhower. Also in 1958 the National Society of Professional Engineers named him Outstanding Engineer of the Year. He was named to the National Football Hall of Fame in 1967 and appointed to the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame Board of Directors in 1970. He was instrumental in bringing Coach Robert Neyland to UT.
In 1976 he published Educators and Athletes, a history of the Southeastern Conference, an athletics association he helped to found and develop. Following his death, his extensive files (over fifty-thousand items) included speeches, journals, appointment books, typescripts for published articles, committee records, lecture notes, and other materials, and were donated to the University Archives by his daughter, Mrs. John Wellborn.