Word: conants
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...Conant was picked because the Corporation saw in him an already brilliant thinker and excellent administrator who had great capabilities for growth...
...James B. Conant was a quiet, forty-year-old professor of Chemistry who had earned an enviable reputation in his field for work with chlorophyll, had gained a slight notoriety among undergraduates for giving a tough course in Organic Chemistry, and was totally unknown to the general public and the academic world. On the following day he was elected president of Harvard University thereby automatically becoming the leading spokesman for American education...
...Conant's election came as a complete shock to the outside world and as a surprise to many of his associates on the Faculty. He was no "wonder-boy," no "out-spoken leader," no "prominent Harvard professor," no "scion of a patrician Boston family." He was an excellent chemist, so good, in fact, that a friend couldn't understand why he would abandon his post to accept the presidency. "My sense of adventure, I guess," he said...
...Conant had always shown an ability to surprise people by doing a great deal better than might be expected. In prep school at Roxbury Latin he had discomfitted his chemistry professor by a few knowing sorties into the field of quantitative analysis, something he wasn't supposed to take up until his sophomore year in college. He bought himself equipment for a laboratory his father had set up for him in an old shack by giving "magic shows" for kids in his neighborhood; he billed himself as "the Young Edison," charged admission, and performed some of the more spectacular experiments...
...Conant found Harvard different, but not much more difficult. Entering in the fall of 1910, he raced through advanced chemistry courses and possibly some what bored, competed for the CRIMSON news board. He was elected to the paper January 17, 1912 after the traditional rugged competition lasting all fall. For the test of his college career which wasn't long since he graduated in there years he successfully juggled studies and the CRIMSON, gaining a magna in the first and becoming assistant managing editor of the second...