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When Charles W. Eliot announced his retirement as president of Harvard in 1909, he said, "The occupation which has been mine for a lifetime has been a most pleasant one, and I regret that it is about to terminate. Forty years of service has been given me in the pursuance of a profession that has no equal in the world." I doubt that many college presidents leave office today in such a generous frame of mind.
Far from the idyllic life described by Eliot, many contemporary college presidents would see themselves in Lytton Strachey's description of John Henry Newman's efforts to establish an Irish university:
For the next five years Newman, unaided and ignored, struggled desperately, like a man in a bog, with the over-mastering difficulties of his task. His mind, whose native haunt was among the far aerial boundaries of fancy and philosophy, was now clamped down under the fetters of petty detail and fed upon the mean diet of compromise and routine. He had to force himself to scrape together money, to write articles for the students' Gazette, to make plans for medical laboratories, to be ingratiating with the City Council; he was obliged to spend months travelling through the remote regions of Ireland in the company of extraordinary ecclesiastics and barbarous squireens. He was a thoroughbred harnessed to a four-wheeled cab; and he knew it.