In an era when nearly every college president bore a triple-barreled name, none carried as potent a charge as Nicholas Murray Butler. To his intimates the president of Columbia University was "Murray"; to the associates who saw him found the school's Teachers College in 1887 at the age of twenty-five he was "Nicholas Miraculous." His employees simply called him President (when they didn't refer to him as "Czar Nicholas"), his acquaintances, Doctor. The editors of Life named him "one of the most erudite men of his time." None of this necessarily contradicted Senator Robert M. La Follette, who said Butler was a "bootlicker of men of fortune." Theodore Roosevelt was even blunter: he considered him "an aggressive and violent ass."
-Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center
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