Professor Godzilla

Hendrix College, a small school outside of Little Rock, Ark., is about to get a new president. His name is William Tsutsui, a Princeton-, Oxford-, and Harvard-educated economist, but he's best known for a certain expertise that has landed him the nickname Professor Godzilla. Tsutsui first heard the infamous roar of the radioactive monster lizard when he was 8 years old, living in the tiny college town of Bryan, Texas.Tsutsui was an only child and biracial; his dad was Japanese, and he had an Anglo mom. There was only one other Asian-American family in Bryan. He felt like an outlier, he says, and was bullied so much he had to be transferred to a different school. But everything changed one day, as he lay on the shag carpet in his parent's bedroom, watching a big old Sylvania TV set. "I see this huge Japanese monster dragging his scaly feet through Tokyo, and I thought, 'That is so cool, I want to be that monster,' " he says. Life became more fun.