There's been a lot of speculation about why University President Jehuda Reinharz is resigning. Plenty of it, if not most of it, leads back to the Rose Art Museum media calamity. But is that really justifiable? Brandeis had six presidents before Reinharz, and each of them eventually resigned. When looking at the reigns of those past presidents, especially those who encountered or created controversy, it becomes increasingly clear just how unclear the reasons behind a presidential resignation can be.

The founding president of the University, Abram L. Sachar, is largely credited with crafting Brandeis as a leading academic institution.

But there were certainly many on campus who had rather negative opinions of Sachar toward the end of his presidency.

An article printed in Time magazine soon after Sachar announced his intention to resign cited the sense that many Brandeisians considered Sachar to be "an academic dictator." In 1964, Sachar threatened to expel a group of students for picketing outside of the Gryzmish administrative building, and just months before his resignation announcement, students organized a widespread and very short boycott of classes because of complaints of overcrowdedness in the classroom.

Prof. Gordon Fellman (SOC) has worked under each Brandeis president, and, in an interview with the Justice last week, said, "Sachar was the most hated president we've ever had."

Yet then-Chairman of the Board of Trustees Lawrence A. Wien told the Justice in 1967 that accepting Sachar's resignation amounted to "the most painful decision it [the Board] has had to make since Brandeis was founded 19 years ago."

So Sachar's incontrovertible contributions and perhaps bombastic presence on campus certainly don't expose obvious resignation causes, especially after 19 years as the founding president-a length that since then only Reinharz has come close to matching.

Our second president, Morris B. Abram, served for less than two years at the end of the 1960s and into 1970. Abram's short presidency was marked almost exclusively by the Ford Hall takeover in the winter of 1969, a rather tense moment in University history by all accounts.

And just a few weeks before Abram's resignation in February 1970, he promoted his idea of a establishing a law school at Brandeis, to more fully complete the University's namesake. Accounts in the Justice from that time indicate that professors and students alike were largely unhappy with such a proposal, and especially with the $2.75 million that a donor had conditionally pledged toward it.

So Abram's resignation in 1970, again, could not be so easily connected to any one incident, even with all that had occurred during his presidency. Judging Abram's reasons for leaving are pretty difficult, especially for someone trying to prove that presidents leave only upon being pressured to do so. He left in order to seek the Democratic nomination for a Senate seat for New York-his campaign failed.

Charles I. Schottland served as University president on an interim arrangement. His term was ended after only two years, as was generally expected.

Fourth University President Marver Bernstein's resignation announcement, which arrived after roughly 11 years as president, was spun more in the direction of a retirement. This, too, can hardly be characterized as a forced resignation, especially considering the lack of any major incident near the end of his presidency.

Evelyn Hander's presidency, however, could be an example of a forced resignation.

An article in the issue of the Justice printed right after she presented the Board with her letter of resignation says it best: "Evelyn Handler angered a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons."

That article in the Justice lists some of the major controversies that riddled her presidency. Perhaps Handler's most egregious decision was to be the only University President to call in outside police forces to break up a student sit-in inside her office. Several students were arrested. This action was met with great dissatisfaction, which is unsurprising since even Abram didn't call in the local authorities, and he was dealing with Ford Hall.

Handler was also made rather infamous by her attempts to change the Jewish character of the University. Apparently, removing the "Jewish" from "Jewish-sponsored non-sectarian" is not as easy as one might think.

Handler's decision to introduce pork products and shellfish on campus (in the Usdan Student Center only) for the first time in 1987 sparked outrage in Jewish communities across the United States. Handler claimed that this was an attempt to attract a more diverse student body. Handler also attempted to remove the Hebrew letters from the University emblem. Needless actions such as these angered Jewish donors who support the University.

Her resignation announcement in 1990 wasn't too surprising.

After a long search and Prof. Stuart Altman's (Heller) interim presidency, the University finally appointed its sixth president, Samuel O. Thier, a former medical school professor at Harvard and Yale.

According to Fellman, who thinks every past University president was essentially asked to leave, "Thier was an exception." Fellman feels that Thier was very well respected and had the potential to be an excellent long-term president. Thier resigned after only several years as president in order to accept the position of head of Massachusetts General Hospital-not exactly a bad next step.

And then, of course, the University soon decided to do an internal search for its next president and selected a popular provost in order fill the seat as seventh president of the University, who continues to serve today.

So is it really that easy to pin down the cause of Reinharz's resignation?

Definitely not.

University presidencies are complicated and sometimes very difficult. The last year or so was a very difficult period for the University, and Reinharz was president during that time, but that doesn't undo all that he has done over the last many years. He may have been involved in questionable decisions over the last few months, but his decision to leave the University cannot be as simple as some have to tried to make it seem.