John Thornton Kirkland

Who was John Thornton Kirkland?

John Thornton Kirkland served as President of Harvard University from 1810 to 1828. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the Hasty Pudding. A religious minister like many of his predecessors, he is remembered chiefly for his lenient treatment of students. Kirkland House, one of Harvard's undergraduate "houses," or residence halls, was named in his honor and in recognition of his term at the school's helm.

Oliver Wendell Holmes describes him thus, in his study of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "His 'shining morning face' was round as a baby's, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did, with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation.... It was of him that the story was always told,--it may be as old as the invention of printing,--that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to pieces and got mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the leaves together as he best might."

His contemporary George Ticknor described Kirkland's sermons as "full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom, with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor."