This fall Harvard inaugurated its twenty-fifth president. Taking note of that event, John T. Bethell, editor of the Harvard Bulletin , decided to recount briefly the travails of the university’s presidents over the past 334 years, often, as he did so, finding familiar themes. Herewith is the amusing minihistory by Mr. Bethell (Harvard, ’54):

When Derek Curtis Bok was installed in October as Harvard University’s twentyfifth president, tradition dictated that he sit briefly on a hallowed relic known as the President’s Chair. Knurled and knotty, crafted by some anonymous artificer of Puritan England, the chair was not designed for comfort. Luckily for the presidents of Harvard, they are only required to use it during inaugurations and on Commencement Day.

Still, the chair’s stern contours may be symbolic, for fully half of Mr. Bok’s twenty-four predecessors found the Harvard presidency irksome and uncomfortable—and said so. Even the nine or ten presidents generally regarded as great or near-great had their share of misery in the office. Two of them were actually forced out of it.

Henry Dunster, whose term lasted from 1640 to 1654, gave direction to the tiny college in its first two decades. Dunster had all the attributes of greatness, but he made the mistake of ensnaring himself in religious controversy. Although it was against the law of Massachusetts to question the practice of infant baptism, Dunster opposed it. Having broken the law, he felt it necessary to resign as president of Harvard.

John Thornton Kirkland, who had the office from 1810 to 1828, was one of Harvard’s most effective and best-loved presidents. His approach to financial administration was somewhat casual, however, and it ultimately drew down the wrath of Nathaniel Bowditch, a member of one of the governing boards. When Bowditch denounced the president’s lackadaisical bookkeeping, Kirkland quickly declared his intent to retire, and did.

Edward Holyoke (1737-69) brought the President’s Chair to Harvard from England and was the first president to sit on it. On his deathbed, at eighty, he issued a warning: “If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become president of Harvard.”

Less able men, before and after Holyoke, were thoroughly humbled and mortified. Nathaniel Eaton (1637-39), master of the college even before it was called Harvard, was summarily dismissed for flogging his students too zealously. His scapegrace career terminated in an English debtors’ prison. The promising administration (1770-73) of Samuel Locke, a bachelor, was aborted by the embarrassing revelation that the president’s maidservant was with child.

Almost from the beginning, Harvard students have worked tirelessly and mercilessly at humbling their presidents. The pomposity of Leonard Hoar (1672-75) prompted students “to Travestie whatever he did and said, and aggravate every thing in his Behaviour disagreable to them, with a Design to make him Odious.” (So wrote the none-too-agreeable Cotton Mather, then a student.) Tutors resigned, and students deserted in a