Interested in giving money to a great university? Well, here’s a solicitation for a “unique new giving opportunity” that was sent around Harvard yesterday. While some question its veracity, others say that this truth-in-fundraising approach is just part of the new, post-Summers Harvard…..

Unique New Giving Opportunity

Nathaniel Eaton University Professorship
To select friends of Harvard:

Events of the last few days have unexpectedly created the opportunity for a few specially chosen friends of Harvard to endow a new University Professorship to be occupied by outgoing president Lawrence H. Summers. Please consider this unique opportunity to help establish the Nathaniel Eaton University Professorship. To underscore the distinction of the first incumbent, the name of this chair harks back to Harvard’s earliest days. Nathaniel Eaton, a friend of John Harvard, was Harvard College’s first head – not president, as there was neither a Faculty nor a board of Fellows or Overseers over which to preside. He was simply Master Eaton, and his faculty consisted of a single assistant master. Eaton served for the academic year 1638-39, after which applications to Harvard fell to a low, not since equaled, of zero, and the College went dormant for a year. The Nathaniel Eaton University Professorship will be distinctive not only for connecting today’s Harvard to its origins and for recalling the brief tenures of both Eaton and Summers. Eaton was also Summers’ equal in scholarly brilliance and in brusque faculty management style, and both Summers and Eaton were troubled by governance crises. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison recounts Eaton’s brief term in office:

The trust placed in Nathaniel Eaton by the community was hardly justified. Very little is known of the single academic year in which he conducted the College, in the former Peyntree House, and that little is not to his credit. ‘He was a Rare Scholar himself, and he made many more such,’ wrote Cotton Mather; the studies were, one infers, of the English freshman grade; but Eaton was too prone to drive home lessons with the rod. At the opening of the second academic year, in August, 1639, the Master made the mistake of beating his assistant so briskly with a walnut-tree cudgel, ‘big enough to have killed a horse,’ that Thomas Shepard rushed in from the parsonage next door to save the poor man’s life, and the magistrates haled Eaton into court for assault. On that occasion there was a general ventilation of complaints against Eaton for brutality, and against his wife for the quality of food and quantity of drink dispensed to her boarders. The magistrates, who had been whipped themselves in school or college, were not disposed to dismiss Eaton for an occasional flogging. But the food question was more serious. … Eaton was promptly dismissed, and fled the country, and after sundry adventures in Virginia, Italy, and England, died in debtors’ prison in Southwark, hard by his friend Harvard’s birthplace. – Three Centuries of Harvard, 9-10.

The great university of which we are privileged to be members rose from the ashes of Eaton’s administration.

Donations may be sent to the Recording Secretary, designated for the Nathaniel Eaton University Professorship.