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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At the time, Gates and A&M faced two major problems (and a host of smaller ones) that threatened to reverse the gains A&M had made during the Bowen years. One was a backslide in academic performance since 1997, when the university cracked U.S. News and World Report’s list of the nation’s top fifty schools for the first time—and archrival t.u. didn’t. By 2004 A&M had sunk to a six-way tie for sixty-seventh. One of the reasons was that A&M had the worst ranking among major universities in the percentage of small classes (fewer than 20 students) and the percentage of big classes (more than 50). The student-faculty ratio was an abysmal 22 to 1. All of these numbers could be attributed to the failure to keep up with faculty hiring. Gates had announced his intention to create more than four hundred positions to be filled by the start of the 2007–2008 school year, a goal that seemed impossible to meet and yet one on which the realization of the university’s academic ambitions depended.
The second issue was diversity. For a major public university, whose stated goal is service to the people of Texas, A&M’s number of minority students is an embarrassment. After the Hopwood case brought an end to affirmative action at all Texas colleges a decade ago, A&M’s freshman class of 1996 included only 230 black students and 713 Hispanics. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2003 that affirmative action admissions programs were constitutional after all, Gates had to decide whether to use race- or ethnicity-based admissions. His decision was no. There was an uproar from some faculty members—a Hispanic professor wrote Gates that he was perpetuating the image of Aggieland as “Crackerland”—but Gates didn’t budge. He invoked A&M’s history as a land-grant college, whose mission was “to make higher education available to all classes of students, not just a select few.” It would seem that this argument would apply equally well to embracing affirmative action as it does to rejecting it, but Gates did not spend thirty years in Washington without developing good political antennae. Doubt about the benefits of diversity still runs deep at A&M. In a recent letter to the Battalion a senior wrote, “It never ceases to amaze me that a man as smart and articulate as President Gates could be duped into buying into the diversity mantra: ‘we will not tolerate intolerance’. … As long as student leaders and administrators continue to worship the idol that is diversity, our students will never recognize that we are all Aggies. Only love for Aggies—not some desire for an idealistic utopia filled with a politically correct blend of races—will bring safety to our students, and an end to hateful stupidity.”
Gates didn’t need race-based admissions to get the numbers moving in the right direction; he just needed a new admissions strategy. After he rejected affirmative action, he eliminated legacy as a factor in admissions for the children of former students. (This year he enlarged the freshman class by 850, which improves the odds for everyone, legacies included.) One admiring faculty member who heard Gates defend his decision told me, “It sent chills down my spine. He asked us to put ourselves in the mind-set of a family who had never had the opportunity to send their kid to college. Ask yourself, ‘Is admitting legacies fair to that student? ’ If we’re going to truly change the stereotype, we have to change our mind-set.” And what is the stereotype? It’s what you see on TV during Aggie football games. All male. All white. All military. All the time.
Gates has put considerable effort and resources into increasing minority enrollment. A new admissions policy junks the old quantitative method of assigning points for grades and test scores. Around 65 percent of the freshman class is made up of “automatic admits”—students who finish in the top 10 percent of their class or score higher than 1300 on the SAT. All of the remaining applicants receive what A&M calls a “holistic full-file review.” The objective is to identify “students who have the propensity and capacity to assume roles of leadership, responsibility, and service to society.” Students are evaluated in three ways: academic achievement (grades and test scores), personal achievement (honors, extracurricular activities, community service), and distinguishing characteristics (educational level of parents, family responsibility and obligations, fluency in a second language, and overcoming adversity in the educational environment). Reviewers never see any information about ethnicity, although “distinguishing characteristics” is clearly a category that generally benefits minority applicants along with first-generation college students. The new admissions policy has continued to attract students who are the first in their family to attend college. For several years, including this year, these students have made up at least a quarter of the freshman class—an astonishing number.
A&M has established scholarship programs for first-generation students (ethnicity is not a criterion); it has opened recruiting centers in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Bryan, and several sites in South Texas. Gates himself makes recruiting visits to inner-city schools. But the yield is still small: just 256 blacks and 1,001 Hispanics among the 7,104 freshmen who entered A&M in 2005. In percentage terms, the increase looks better: Hispanic freshman enrollment was up 45 percent in two years, black enrollment 62 percent.
Why hasn’t A&M had more success attracting blacks or Hispanics? One of the obstacles to attracting more minorities, everyone concedes, is that too many Aggies haven’t gotten the memo that “respect” is a core value. In his State of the University address last year, Gates said, “[Our] welcoming and friendly environment makes a gigantic university into a family, the Aggie family, where we respect each other, look out for each other, bond together for the rest of our lives.” Of those “who would exclude and insult some members of the Aggie family,” he went on to say, “their behavior belies all we believe not just about the Aggie family, but the importance of character, integrity, and ethics here at Texas A&M.”
You will find racial prejudice on any campus, but at A&M it has the added complexity of being part of the fear of change that goes all the way back to the admission of women in the sixties—fear that if the kinds of students who come here are different, A&M will be different too. This attitude applies not only to minorities and foreign students (one of whom was assaulted in September) but also to liberal arts students. When the report establishing A&M’s long-term goals, known as Vision 2020, came out during the Bowen presidency, one of its goals was to build up the liberal arts, and Berkeley was included among the peer institutions to which A&M was compared. Big mistake. Many former students objected, saying that the last thing they wanted was for A&M to be like Berkeley. (Not to worry.) And yet the reality of Texas A&M is often very different from its image: The College of Liberal Arts graduates more majors than agriculture, business, or engineering, the colleges that carry out the university’s original mission.
The resistance to change is in the DNA at Texas A&M. The reason Earl Rudder (1959-1970) was A&M’s greatest president is that he was able to overcome this resistance and bring about the changes that rescued the university from a slide into irrelevancy: the admission of women and the end of compulsory membership in the Corps of Cadets. His decisions reversed the trend of declining enrollment in the anti-war sixties. No other president could have done what he did. Rudder was not only an A&M graduate but also a war hero. On D-day he commanded a Ranger battalion that scaled one-hundred-foot cliffs at Omaha Beach under heavy fire to destroy German gun emplacements and help the invading forces establish a beachhead. His unit suffered a casualty rate of more than 50 percent.
If you think this didn’t matter at Texas A&M, and if you think that Bob Gates’ service to his country doesn’t matter, you don’t understand this place at all. Aggies take patriotism very seriously. The university’s seven Congressional Medal of Honor winners are remembered in the Memorial Student Center. Even so, many Aggies of that era believed that Rudder had destroyed the university, that the Aggie spirit would never survive the changes, but he was untouchable. Undoubtedly, there are Aggies today who feel the same way about some of Gates’s changes, from committing to raise minority enrollment to something as insignificant (on any other campus) as converting Hotard Hall, an ancient dormitory that was regarded by its residents as a hotbed of the Aggie spirit, into an office building. For an occasional visitor like me, however, the wonder is not how much A&M has changed but that, in all the ways that matter to Aggies, it has remained the same. Name one other school where a women’s soccer game would draw an estimated 8,500 people, as the Aggies did, against North Carolina, an NCAA record.
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