Boone Pickens and the Roach Motel
The master of takeovers is caught up in a feud between the president and the faculty of a Panhandle university. It all could have been avoided if only he had read his own book.
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Pickens made his reputation taking on the big guys, the people he has characterized as the bloated, self-indulgent heads of America’s big corporations. But when he talks about WTSU, one can only think that no one is too small for Pickens to attack. Here he is, accusing a university professor—an outspoken opponent of Roach’s—of being an alcoholic. Another Roach critic has no credibility because he was pictured in the campus yearbook standing on his head. Pickens dismisses a local writer as a “drunk who makes thirteen thousand dollars a year.” Don Stribling, an ex-WTSU employee who is now the youth director at the First Presbyterian Church, which Pickens attends, wrote a letter to the Globe-News that was highly critical of Pickens’ role as a regent. In response Pickens himself hands out a packet of correspondence dealing with the “grave concern” he has with Stribling’s behavior as a church employee. Stribling kept his job after a church meeting was held on the matter.
Pickens is aware of how fantastic it all seems. “You hang around here for a while,” he says. “We’ll get you as screwy as we are.”
The Change Agent
The college was founded in 1910 in Canyon, seventeen miles south of Amarillo. The location in the small agricultural center was a life sentence to the educational backwater—at least until Boone Pickens and Ed Roach determined to change it. WTSU started out as a teacher’s college, West Texas Normal College. (When a member of the faculty recently told Pickens that he just wanted things to get back to normal, Pickens responded, “Yes, you want to get back to West Texas Normal, and I’m not going to have any part of that.”) Over the years the school has been redesignated a state college and then a university, but it still plays much the same role it did in the beginning. Most of the teachers in the Amarillo area were educated at WTSU, and many of the students are the first generation of their family to go to college.
WTSU is hardly the sort of place where you would expect to find a faculty in revolt. The sixties came and went without making a ripple. Probably the most notable event in the school’s history occurred in 1916, when Georgia O’Keeffe came from New York to join the art faculty; she left after a year. For most of the current faculty, the appeal of the university lies in the freedom from the pressure of the academic big time; there is no publish-or-perish rule at WTSU. Even the campus itself, with its squat and undistinguished brick buildings, evokes a sense of utilitarian modesty. A visitor hears the same refrain over and over: “It is such a nice place to settle down and raise a family.”
By the early seventies, enrollment swelled to nearly 8,000 students, and the regents, anticipating further increases, launched an ambitious building program. The school acquired enough administrators to accommodate a student body of 15,000. But the bust caused enrollment to drop off, and so did the Legislature’s 1985 decision to triple out-of-state tuition—a devastating blow for a school that drew heavily on eastern New Mexico and western Oklahoma. The decline has continued, administrators say, because of the well-publicized problems on campus. Today the university has just 5,742 students.
In the face of hard times, Ed Roach’s business background—he had been the dean of the business school at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos—made him the choice of the search committee for WTSU’s new president in 1984. It certainly wasn’t his congeniality or charisma. Sturdily built, with sandy, thinning hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and a card in his wallet documenting his excellent physical condition as a dedicated runner, Roach has a perpetually tense, serious demeanor. When a humorous remark is made, he has a disconcerting way of staring uncomprehendingly, as if the speaker had suddenly lapsed into a foreign language.
During his interview with the search committee, Roach would flip open a loose-leaf binder and consult its charts and graphs before answering questions. He employed terms like “strategic planning,” a subject on which he had given lectures around the state. This was exactly what the regents wanted. Says Nolon Henson, a regent from Happy, “Running a university now is a more business-type thing.” Ed Roach and Boone Pickens did not know each other before Roach came to WTSU. But once the new president was installed, he and Pickens became close. For Pickens, Roach’s ability to speak the language of management made up for his lack of charm. “People say Ed Roach is too grim,” Pickens told a writer for a WTSU publication. “You don’t smile when you’re thinking.”
Ed Roach had big plans for WTSU, plans that went far beyond simply cutting administrators and overhauling the physical plant. He wanted to make the sleepy school nothing short of excellent. He was going to start with the kind of strategic plan he lectured about. WTSU would decide on a few things worth doing, do them well, and eliminate everything else. In the process there would be a complete reevaluation of every aspect of the university—the administration, the academic departments, the number of faculty, and the role of athletics.
It was his determination to change WTSU, Roach believes, that caused all the trouble. On a spring afternoon, he sits in his office and sketches a graph that looks like a large check mark. “This represents change,” he says. He circles the bottom point of the check. “This has been labeled the ‘valley of despair.’” Only after passing through the valley, he explains, can change be effective. But Roach, Pickens, and WTSU have been stuck in the valley of despair for four years.
“I’m a change agent,” Roach says. “Boone Pickens is a change agent. You go back through history—typically, change agents aren’t loved.”
The Imperial President
Ed Roach came to WTSU to make changes, and make them he did. His first targets, however, were hardly the kinds of things that strategic plans are made of. Within weeks of his arrival in July 1984, he remodeled his office suite—at a cost of $50,000. He traded in the previous president’s Chevrolet Celebrity for a Buick Park Avenue. For his gala inauguration that fall, the speaker was former president Gerald Ford. It was a bit highfalutin for WTSU—the ceremony soon was being referred to around campus as the coronation—but Roach remained a curiosity rather than an object of malice.
The next spring Roach changed the campus food service. The old supplier, Marriott, satisfied its student customers: it served West Texas fare, including, once a semester, calf fries. But it didn’t satisfy Ed Roach. The problem wasn’t so much the food as again a matter of style. At Southwest Texas State, Roach had seen catered breakfast meetings for the president using a silver service and uniformed help; Marriott’s catering for presidential affairs was “third rate,” Roach says. So he got rid of Marriott and hired SWTSU’s food supplier, Professional Food Management.
In response, there was a revolt. Three times a day, every day, the school was reminded that the president seemed to care more about his sugar-and-creamer set than about the people who had to eat the food. Students held angry meetings and wrote outraged letters to the school paper. Discussion of presidential perquisites became a new pastime; the food service joined the litany of the redecorated office, the car, and the coronation.
Under fire, Roach responded by digging in. He saw the food-service fight as a dress rehearsal for the academic battles that were yet to come. He clashed with Bob Kinney, the dean who dealt with the food service (“I’m convinced that if I had been left alone, I could have worked it out,” Kinney says, “but Dr. Roach wanted me to control people”). Within a year, in the first example of what would become a pattern at WTSU, Kinney lost his job. Roach says Kinney was unable to make decisions.
The next thing that Roach got was the house. An official residence had been under discussion for years. Roach made the case to the regents that it would be more like a university building than a private residence. He pointed out that there was nowhere on campus to entertain actual and potential contributors and nowhere elegant in town to put up important visitors.
In the fall of 1984 the regents received approval from the state’s higher education coordinating board for a $494,000 house. By the time the house was completed in 1986, the cost had ballooned to nearly $1 million. It appeared that the commercial-quality kitchen and an enlarged septic system had been left out of the original estimates. Roach went to Austin to get more state money for the house, but the coordinating board agreed to pick up only part of the balance and told the university to find the remaining $211,000 itself. To save money, the administration assigned university maintenance workers from their regular duties to help finish construction. A painter named Winfred Padgett refused to go and complained in the local newspaper about coworkers who had spent their time building a presidential wine rack. Ten months later Padgett was laid off.
If changing the food service was a miscalculation, then building the house was a fiasco. With money getting tight, Roach seemed to be saying, “Everybody has to make sacrifices but me.” He even requested that one of the music department’s best teaching pianos be moved to the new residence. The department head suggested a new piano be purchased instead. Administrators had to talk Roach out of firing the man.
All this might have been expected to raise the ire of Boone Pickens, who has made a career out of skewering corporate executives for their love of perks. But Pickens finds fault only with Roach’s critics. “My wife summed it up very well,” he says of the presidential abode. “She said she’s never been to a place like this, where they have something nice and don’t want it.”
My Library
