By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON
A year into his first full-time teaching job, Newt Gingrich applied to be college president, submitting with his application a paper titled “Some Projections on West Georgia College’s Next Thirty Years.”
Newt Gingrich fashions himself as the history professor of the GOP presidential field. So what exactly was he like as an academic? Elizabeth Williamson on Lunch Break looks at West Georgia College, which employed the former Speaker in the late 1970s.
Mel Steely, a history professor who played a role in Mr. Gingrich’s hiring in 1970, said the bid drew “a chuckle” from administrators. The following year, Mr. Gingrich applied to be chairman of the history department. That wasn’t greeted so kindly, Mr. Steely said, with some favoring a longtime professor and World War II veteran.
“We weren’t going to make Newt our chairman, but he liked the idea of competing for almost anything,” said Mr. Steely, who later wrote a complimentary biography of Mr. Gingrich titled “The Gentleman From Georgia.” “He figured ‘I’m capable of doing this,’ and it didn’t bother him so much that it offended anybody.”
Mr. Gingrich often says his experience as a historian would make him a superior president. During Monday’s GOP debate, he lectured “as a historian” on “a fact-based model” for revamping Social Security, citing the success of programs in Galveston, Texas, and Chile.
So what was Professor Gingrich actually like? A clutch of little-known records from what is now the University of West Georgia in Carrollton suggests the ambition and intellectual grandeur of Newt 2012 aren’t a long way from the 1970s vintage. In addition to seeking the college presidency, Mr. Gingrich was often absent as he pursued political goals. He embarked on an effort to moonlight as a paid consultant. And, it turns out, he spent little time teaching history.
Mr. Gingrich coordinated the school’s fledgling environmental-studies department and by 1976 was removed from the history department because his “interest in long-range and broad-range planning for the future...is clearly more appropriate to the orientation of our Department of Geography,” a 1975 letter from then-college president Ward Pafford reads.
Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond emphasized that Mr. Gingrich’s backing in history includes a master’s and doctoral degree from Tulane University and extensive research and writing on the subject. “He’s talked about teaching environmental studies” at West Georgia, Mr. Hammond said.
Then as now, “There was this whole wealth of information that he was communicating in digestible bites,” said J. Randolph Evans, a West Georgia student of Mr. Gingrich who was his legal counsel when he was House speaker in the 1990s and chairman of several Gingrich ventures. He described Mr. Gingrich as an engaged and energetic professor.