The ambitious young professor running for president... of his college: How Newt Gingrich started on the path to the White House in his university days

Newt Gingrich applied to become president of his college aged just 28, according to newly unearthed documents.



The future politician had been in his first job, as a junior history professor at West Georgia College, for a year when he made an audacious bid to take over the institution.



Mr Gingrich's fierce ambition and political dedication from a young age have been revealed in an archive of documents relating to his academic career.



Ambitious: Newt Gingrich was keen to advance himself during his first job, as a history professor at West Georgia College

The papers, first published in the Wall Street Journal, show that even during his academic career Mr Gingrich devoted much of his time to political activity.



The former Speaker of the House, now battling to become the Republican Presidential candidate, took unpaid leave from West Georgia three times to pursue political campaigns.



A college press release at the time claimed he was 'as likely to be attending a political caucus as he is to be teaching a college class.'

But his most extraordinary power grab came in 1971, when he applied to become president of West Georgia despite his youth and inexperience.



As part of the application, he compiled a document entitled 'Some Projections on West Georgia College's Next Thirty Years', which was warmly received by the incumbent president.



And while Mr Gingrich's first presidential bid was always unlikely to succeed, it drew 'a chuckle' from college administrators, according to one of his senior colleagues.



Campaigning: Mr Gingrich took leave three times to concentrate on politics

The application came just a year after he started his post at West Georgia, his first - and only - academic appointment, despite his frequent claims on the campaign trail that his experience as a historian is an important part of his presidential credentials.



He came to that job after completing a PhD at Tulane University, where his teachers described him as 'top man in the class' and where his supervisor rating him 'outstanding' in every single category, adding that he was 'mature and thought-provoking beyond even the superior student'.



But even as he was applying for his job at West Georgia, he made it clear that his ambitions were not confined to academia.



In his application he said that as well as 'teaching well' and 'writing some books worth reading', one of his priorities was 'participating in the development of a better world'.



This led to initiatives such as 'The Institute for Directed Change and Renewal', a for-profit think-tank which Mr Gingrich wanted to use to sell consulting services to public schools - until his college told him he could not deal with any other state institutions.



Aggressive: The GOP Presidential candidate is known as one of the most combative politicians of his generation

And his constant striving sometimes caused conflict with his colleagues, leading him to write a letter of apology to his faculty chair for upsetting him in an incident which the documents do not describe.



Mr Gingrich wrote: 'Occasionally a young man acting in innocence will cause trouble while pursuing what he believes to be a good cause.'



Despite his political ambitions, he claimed to be an outsider at a time when all politicians were under suspicion following the revelation of the Watergate scandal.



He told a local newspaper in 1973 that he was 'an anti-politician' - similar to the claims made now by Mr Gingrich and his GOP rivals to be anti-establishment mavericks.



Eventually, his academic career fizzled out, as his increasing involvement with politics limited the amounts of teaching and research he did,and he left West Georgia in 1977 after failing to get tenure.



Mr Gingrich's obsessive political drive has long been known, as he has long been thought to be one of the most aggressive campaigner in U.S. politics.



He is even rumoured to have divorced his first wife because she was not 'young or pretty enough' to be First Lady.

