Who on earth would want to be president of Suffolk University now?

What a massive hash the board of trustees has made of that place and its reputation. The downtown college prides itself on turning out socially conscious graduates and civic leaders, the kinds of people who make a city great. Pity the poor faculty and students, who strive to embody those ideals even in the midst of chaos — chaos created by people who are supposed to be the grown-ups, but have acted like impetuous children.

This should have been over six months ago. Almost as soon as she took her new job as president, Margaret McKenna — who had had 22 successful, incident-free years as president of Lesley University — displeased the board of trustees at Suffolk, the wired men and women who really ran the place. McKenna’s main transgression appears to have been wanting to fire George Regan, the PR guy paid obscene amounts of money by Suffolk for 27 years to do little more than cause trouble and, with his allies, undermine a succession of leaders.

McKenna was Suffolk’s fifth president in five years, including interims. But somehow the trustees never saw themselves as the problem. Not even after they were told by accreditors to establish sane boundaries and good governance. They tried to fire McKenna, but she refused to go, bolstered by the support of students, faculty, and alumni united as never before.

In February, the board and McKenna reached an agreement that resulted in the May departure of board chairman Drew Meyer, and a commitment by McKenna to leave by the fall of 2017.

That should have been the end of it. But the board couldn’t let it go, hiring another PR firm to burnish their images. And a vengeful Regan fired off a torrent of accusations against McKenna that the college then spent massive amounts of money investigating. (They won’t say how much, but at a school that depends on tuition for almost all of its revenue, whatever it cost was way too much.)

In July, the investigator reported that Regan’s claims were baseless. But get this: the board held an emergency meeting to discuss the findings and decided to fire McKenna — who was already leaving — anyway. The trustees had her vacate the premises immediately, with a police escort.

Why do such a dramatic, humiliating thing? Amazingly, two weeks later, as the students and teachers who rallied around McKenna prepare to return to campus, we still don’t know.

McKenna released a statement saying the board told her she was fired because of her communications with the school’s accrediting agency, and because she’d talked to the Globe.

That seems pretty tame, not nearly enough to merit the drastic step taken by the board, and the damage it has done. McKenna had already agreed to quit: Ditching her like this reopens all the board’s self-inflicted wounds, and does further harm to the university. Why not keep her in her position, and quietly begin the search for her successor?

New board chairman Robert Lamb called McKenna’s account of her firing “misleading at best,’’ but refused to say any more. Lamb was supposed to be turning the place around, but it looks like the board turned him around. He and interim president Marisa Kelly have been working hard to convince students, faculty, and alumni that they want stability at last for Suffolk. But stability can come only through transparency, which is still sorely lacking down there on Tremont Street. Neither the university’s spokesman, nor Larry Rasky, whose firm is paid handsomely to contain the damage this heinous year has wrought, would comment on the firing Wednesday.

Suffolk University — now on its sixth president in six years — desperately needs a stellar chief who will be allowed to do her job, and for a long time.

Firing McKenna without explanation has made finding that person almost impossible.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.