Harvard’s last chief community relations officer left his post after only two years. The man below him in the office who represented University interests to Cambridge lasted only 18 months.

Both former Harvard officials Paul S. Grogan and Travis McCready were wooed from the University by the same Boston charity. But both also left saying they had encountered frustrations in working with the Cambridge community they hadn’t expected.

Now, as the newly installed vice president of government, community and public relations, Alan Stone, moves into his position, he plans to meet soon with city officials in the hopes of making a good first impression on those whose past criticism of Harvard has been both strident and sustained.

Stone comes to Harvard from Columbia University, where he held a similar job for the past six years. One week into office, he says he hopes to stay put for a while.

“I have no anticipation of being someone who leaves quickly,” Stone says.

But he enters an office that presented significant stresses to past occupants.

Some administrators have lasted in Harvard’s office of government, community and public relations for decades, but its two most recent hires before Stone were also the most recent to leave.

Stone’s post opened last April when Grogan left his vice presidential post at Harvard to assume the Boston Foundation’s presidency.

Grogan had said when he arrived he would remain in office for at least five years. But he said when he left that the Boston Foundation was giving him the “opportunity of a lifetime.” He cut his Harvard tenure short at two years.

Then last month, from his position at the Boston Foundation, Grogan tapped McCready, Harvard’s director of community relations for Cambridge, to be his chief of staff. A year and a half earlier, McCready had entered optimistic about the work he planned to do for Harvard in Cambridge.

He would be leading University discussions with Cambridge residents about ongoing development projects in the Mid-Cambridge and Riverside neighborhoods—a prospect he looked forward to.

“There seems to be intelligent dialogue conducted for the most part in a respectful manner,” he told the Harvard Gazette at the time.

But by last spring, negotiations with Riverside had bogged down over Harvard’s plans to build a modern art museum in the neighborhood. Residents decried any Harvard intrusion into their neighborhood.

The hostility and public attacks took their toll on McCready.

“It’s frustrating sometimes that there are people who want to be activists and are not always tempered by reason,” McCready told The Crimson last spring.