Agent of Change
Robert Gates helped win the cold war as director of the CIA, but that assignment was a walk in the park compared with his current one: bringing Texas A&M university’s unique but not always admired culture into the modern era and remaking the way the world views Aggieland—and the way Aggieland views the world.
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This is why Bob Gates wants to rebrand Texas A&M. One does not spend a career in Washington, working for an agency that does its work in secret and cannot publicly defend itself against its critics in the executive branch, the Congress, and the media, without learning that perception can become reality. He has never hidden his intentions. “I am an agent of change,” he told the A&M Board of Regents when he was interviewed for the job of president (for which his competition was none other than former U.S. senator Phil Gramm). “If you don’t want change, you don’t want me.”
TWENTY YEARS AGO, ROY SPENCE SAW THE future. “Purpose-based branding,” he told me. “It means that what a company stands for will be as important as what it sells. Visionary companies have a core purpose beyond making money.” A co-founder of the Austin-based advertising agency GSD&M, Spence has fashioned this pitch into a mantra. He loves to quote from Built to Last and Good to Great, Jim Collins’s best-selling books about corporate management, which set out to discover what separates the most successful companies from the rest of the pack. Steve Moore, A&M’s new chief marketing officer, says of Spence, “He is a true believer, an evangelist.”
Spence grew up in Brownwood, played quarterback under the legendary coach Gordon Wood, and has a rugged West Texas face under his blond hair to show for his years outdoors in the wind. When he gets excited, his voice gets softer, not louder, and smooth as purée. “You can’t make up your values,” he said of branding. “They have to be real. We discover and bring to life the values of companies.” He told a story about how Southwest Airlines chairman Herb Kelleher, before the company’s twenty-fifth anniversary, asked him, “What does our brand really stand for?” and after some discussion about making it possible for people who had never flown before to be able to afford to fly, Kelleher came up with “to democratize the skies.” That’s all Spence needed to know. “We took Herb out of the airline business,” he said, “and put him in the freedom business. Southwest even has a freedom manifesto. A flight attendant is free to sing. It helps us recruit.”
Two years ago Spence gave a talk to the American Council on Education, which bills itself as the unifying voice for higher education, in which he volunteered to rebrand higher education. “We’ve got to get the public to support higher ed again,” he told me. “It’s our last hope to be a solutions machine for the world.” Gates was on the ACE committee that decided to bring Spence onboard, and Moore ultimately retained GSD&M to do purpose-based branding for Texas A&M. That Spence was a teasip—he graduated from UT in 1971—who had previously done a branding campaign for UT was no obstacle. The cultures of the two schools are so different that their rivalry, always fierce in athletics, does not extend to education. “He liked the process we use,” Spence said of Gates. “Interviews with alumni, faculty, students, administrators, parents, high school guidance counselors, companies that hire A&M graduates—these allowed us to discover the university’s purpose. Purpose is the North Star.”
As I listened to Spence, I found myself thinking, “Doesn’t A&M know what its purpose is? I know what it is. It’s to make Aggies.” And I mean that in the best sense. The university goes to extraordinary lengths to get students to “buy in.” The process starts with Fish Camp, three-day summer orientation sessions in East Texas at which freshmen learn yells and Aggie traditions and, more seriously, begin the process of feeling part of the extended Aggie family. (At a campus-area eatery, I saw a girl wearing a blue Fish Camp T-shirt that read “Where Else But Aggieland Can You Whip It Out and Hump It?”) By the third day, love for the school has been instilled. One reason for the success of Fish Camp is that it is entirely planned and run by students. In fact, many things at A&M are student run. Students drive the buses that shuttle other students around campus. Students run the career fair at the business school. Once school starts, freshmen are encouraged, both by the university and by other students, to join student organizations, which number around eight hundred. The idea is not just for everyone to find a niche but also to give students a chance to develop into leaders. (A&M even offers a major in Agricultural Leadership and Development.) All of this extracurricular activity is known at A&M as “the other education,” and it is valued as highly by the university as the real education.
The branding process for A&M identified six core values: integrity, loyalty, excellence, leadership, selfless service, and respect. The last core value addresses a longtime problem at A&M—as Moore puts it, “respect, acceptance, and inclusion for all Aggies with respect to race, color, gender, and religion.” All of these values point to a core purpose: “to develop leaders of character dedicated to serving the greater good.”
If you’re wondering where this is leading, well, so did I. If A&M wants the world to know how good it is academically, why are most of its core values nonacademic? Why does branding appear to have more to do with the other education than with traditional education?
The answer, Spence explained, lies in yet another sacred text about corporate management: Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Generation X is approaching middle age and will soon be replaced by the Millennials—a generation born after 1981, who came of age starting in the year 2000, and who, the theory goes, has a different set of values from the cynical, selfish Xers. Millennials, according to Strauss and Howe, are confident, optimistic, goal oriented, civic minded, inclusive, and patriotic.
Finally, I got it. Football coach Dennis Franchione would understand: Rebranding is about recruiting. It’s about eradicating an image of the university that is out-of-date but still persists—that, seen from a distance, A&M, with its arcane rituals and its intense sense of family, sometimes resembles a cult more than a culture. Now its core values and its purpose statement are aligned with the values and ambitions of the Millennials. How does a university teach leadership and service? The best way is to find young people who already have those traits. As Steve Moore told me, “We want to get kids who know what they’re getting.” Sometime this fall, A&M will send out its rebranding campaign to high school guidance counselors. And soon afterward, the Millennials will come to realize that they are Aggies—new, improved, thoroughly modern Aggies—waiting to be made.
BOB GATES CAME TO TEXAS A&M in 1999 as the interim dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service. The A&M regents had previously separated the school from the College of Liberal Arts, and Gates had taken the job at the request of Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, the president of the foundation that oversees and supports the Bush presidential library on campus. “It’s largely honorific,” Scowcroft told Gates, who had been Scowcroft’s deputy at the National Security Council in the George H. W. Bush administration. “It will require a day or two a month for nine months.” Gates smothered a sardonic laugh at that memory. “That was classic bait and switch,” he said. “It turned out to be two weeks a month for two years.” Gates and his wife resided, as they do now, at one home ninety miles north of Seattle and another on remote Orcas Island—“From the tallest mountain on Orcas, you can see Vancouver”—and at first he was not enthusiastic about spending a lot of time in College Station.
During his first year as dean, he stayed in the regents’ quarters, in the Memorial Student Center, smack in the middle of campus. “I saw a lot,” he said. The old CIA instinct to observe, to analyze, to conclude was insuppressible. Gates attended meetings of the deans and saw that the crucial decisions—about funding, for instance—were made at a higher level, by vice presidents who were nonacademics. “The deans were an asset that was not being taken advantage of,” he said. When Ray Bowen announced his retirement, the battle to replace him came down to Gates and Phil Gramm. The story at the time was that Rick Perry, who had become governor in 2000, wanted the regents to choose Gramm, but Bush 41 was influential in the eventual choice of Gates.
The moment when Gates signaled his intentions was the graduation ceremony in December 2002. The traditional seating arrangement was for attending faculty members to be seated almost out of sight, on the arena floor, with the vice presidents onstage, in the front row, and the deans seated behind them. One of Gates’ stated goals for A&M was to “elevate the faculty,” but no one knew he meant it physically as well as conceptually. Early arrivals at the ceremony were startled to see that new construction had expanded the stage, allowing the faculty to sit on the same level as the rest of the A&M leadership. The front row was now occupied by the deans, with the vice presidents seated behind them. Coming from a former Sovietologist, who had made a career of noticing who was standing next to whom at Kremlin events, the message was unmistakable: The new arrangements represented a revolutionary transfer of power, from administrators to the faculty and deans. When I went to A&M in 2004 to write about the university’s growing pains as it wrestled with change, many of the people I interviewed brought up the ceremony as the signature moment of Gates’s presidency.
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