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.
(Page 4 of 5)
TO RETURN TO TEXAS A&M two years after the turmoil of 2004 is to encounter a different university. The faculty members I talked to then had serious doubts whether many of the new positions could be filled. A&M is a good place for married faculty, I was told. But Bryan-College Station was not a good place for singles. You couldn’t go out in the evening without running into students. Nor was it a good place for minority faculty. The local black and Hispanic communities were poor. Minority faculty members had to go to Houston to buy cosmetics and hair products. Some chose to commute from Houston, Austin, or some of the small towns in between. What I, and perhaps the faculty itself, didn’t realize is that there are many more good professors looking for jobs than there are good jobs. Two years later, A&M has filled 333 of the 447 positions and the student-faculty ratio is down 20 to 1. It is on track to meet Gates’s deadline of fall 2007.
Faculty members love to grouse. There were plenty of grousers two years ago. This time, I found none. Take sociology professor Rogelio Saenz. A staunch supporter of affirmative action, he was highly critical of Gates’s decision to reject it. And now? “I’m pleasantly surprised,” he told me this fall. “This has been the most exciting time in twenty years.” He continues to criticize the decision not to use race as a factor in admissions—“We’ve got a long way to go”—but he also found much to praise in new scholarships that have been created for low-income students. Other presidents talked a good game, he said. The difference is, “Gates has marshaled resources.”
The arrival of new faculty has done far more than just reduce the student-faculty ratio. It has reinvigorated the university. “There’s more energy here,” Saenz said, and this was not the only time I heard this view expressed. One of the concerns I had about adding a large number of faculty members in a short time was where they would come from: major schools or, in an effort to get the numbers up quickly, the backwaters of academia. Sociology was given six new positions, Saenz said. One, an endowed chair, went to Joe Feagin, a past president of the American Sociology Association, who had taught at UT and more recently at the University of Florida. Another established professor came from the University of Georgia. His Ph.D. was from the University of Chicago. The other four were entry-level assistant professors, three of whom had just received their Ph.D.’s and the fourth had earned a postdoctoral fellowship. They came from the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. No backwaters here. This is a stunning accomplishment. Repeat this across 65 departments, and the academic future of A&M is ensured for the next decade. Gates has also taken steps to ensure that what A&M has built up will not be easily taken away. He has raised the salaries of professors who fell behind their peers during a period of tight budgets, upping the cost to colleges that might want to steal them .
Equally surprising to me was the change that has taken place in the Corps of Cadets. Its numbers had been dwindling for years, to the point where the unthinkable was being thought: that the day might come when the Corps might cease to exist. One of the biggest obstacles to increasing the Corps’ numbers was the perception that a freshman couldn’t be in the Corps and survive academically. The reason was a tradition known as “Corps games,” in which upperclassmen made freshmen who had somehow messed up do physical training instead of attend class. The harassment could last all day. The commandant of the Corps, Lieutenant General (ret.) John Van Alstyne, was determined to put a stop to it but encountered a we-had-to-do-it-now-they-have-to-do-it-too attitude from the upperclassmen. Writing about this in 2004, I said, “The Corps is a dying institution.” Reports of its death turned out to be greatly exaggerated. This year, the Corps’ ranks are up from 1,700 to more than 1,800, the number of female cadets (207) is at an all-time high, and the grade point average of freshmen in the Corps last spring was higher than the university’s overall average.
Many of the changes Gates has made have come in the area of governance. And most of these are too prosaic to talk about. It is a task force here, a committee there, a new initiative over there, but they all add up to a better way of running the university—more businesslike, more receptive to new ideas. He seldom rules by fiat. His style is to create a climate in which change is encouraged and bring in a person who is amenable to it. He did not originate the change in the name of the College of Agriculture, but he replaced a longtime dean with a new one. That she happened to be the first woman dean in the history of the college was another signal to the old boys in ag that change was coming. (I wonder if the display that greets visitors to the college—“The Pork Hall of Fame”—is long for this world.) And the old boys got the signal. “We have fourteen departments, and money was always distributed according to historical allocations,” one ag professor told me. “Now we have department reviews. I’ve been here thirty-one years, and we’ve never moved money around. We always worked on the principle that the only person who really likes change is a baby with a dirty diaper. This is the new world.”
The symbolism embodied by the name change matters to Gates. As the rearrangement of the people on the stage at graduation indicated, it is part of his governing style. One of his priorities was to make room for the newly hired professors to have office space in the central part of the campus, where they could interact with students. This required moving mid-level administrators to the periphery of the campus. Now these “bean counters,” as I heard them referred to, have been relocated to a new complex across a major thoroughfare from the main campus, behind the vet school.
Faculty and staff at other universities may regard these changes as the norm rather than the exception. But A&M is located in a relatively small community, far from the kind of scrutiny that occurs at UT and other big universities, and it evolved differently from other colleges. “This is an old university, but it’s one of the youngest comprehensive research universities in the country,” Charles Johnson, the dean of liberal arts, told me. A&M didn’t have faculty tenure until the late sixties. It didn’t have a faculty senate until the eighties. Administrators who were not academics made many of the decisions about where money would be allocated. The administration itself was inbred; most of the people who ran A&M were themselves Aggies. Too often, these administrators bought into the old Aggie idea that the heart was more important than the head. “We don’t want to say we’re only spirit and values,” says Steve Moore.
Another newfangled Gates notion—not entirely welcome to old hands—was that, in an era when the state’s contributions to higher education were not as generous as they once were, the university should be run more like a business. He brought in a new chief financial officer, and among the operations that face revamping or elimination are the faculty club, the purchasing department, and the nonperforming dining halls; any peripheral service that is losing money is history. The old-boy network may not be gone entirely, but it is endangered: About four hundred staff positions have been eliminated since Gates became president. “I was not brought here,” he told me, “to be everybody’s friend.”
No area of the university is more enthusiastic about Gates than the faculty. This attitude had already taken hold two years ago, when Marty Loudder, then the speaker of the faculty senate, told me, “I’d walk through hot coals for that man.” The current speaker, Doug Slack, said Gates told him, “I will not make a decision of importance to the faculty without consulting the faculty.” When a proposed intellectual property rule required faculty members to get permission from the Texas A&M System to write a book, the faculty was able to get the policy changed. One morning, when Gates was on vacation, Slack got a call from him. Gates had just read a book, Excellence Without a Soul, about how Harvard’s faculty had failed the university and its students; he was bringing back copies for Slack, the provost, and the vice presidents to read and discuss at a retreat. “Think about what we want Texas A&M graduates to be. How do we get them there?” Gates said. It had been thirty years, Slack told me, since anyone had given him homework.
As far-reaching as these governance changes were, what really matters at a university is academics. Here, too, Gates has made some important moves. A&M has always emphasized undergraduate education; many of its Ph.D. programs are of recent vintage. It has had trouble competing for good graduate students because major universities typically pay for their tuition and also provide a stipend. This has not been the case at A&M—until now. You may ask, “So what?” The answer is that in the academic world, a university’s reputation depends more on the quality of its graduate students than its undergraduate students. Where those students get hired as professors— Berkeley or Boise State—affects that reputation. It’s strictly word of mouth. A&M didn’t provide the money to compete for top graduate students. Now it does: Last year the university provided $8.4 million in tuition for graduate assistants.
Of all the changes Gates has made, he believes that the elevation and expansion of the faculty is the most important. He knows—I’m speculating here, not paraphrasing him—that one of the greatest threats to A&M’s academic renaissance is a return to the bad old days (bad old decades is more like it) when the old-boy network ran the university. There will always be tension at A&M between Old Aggies and New Aggies. The difference is not age but outlook. Only a system of governance that guarantees the faculty a voice in decision making can keep A&M on the track Gates has set for it.
My Library
