Corps Values
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At A&M, norms are so well established that no deviation occurs without a reason. Change at A&M inspires scrutiny reminiscent of the way American intelligence officials once pored over photographs of public events in the Soviet Union and China during the cold war, perusing seating arrangements for clues as to who was in favor and who was out, a process few appreciate more than Gates himself, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the elder George Bush's presidency. The symbolic message of the new seating assignments was unmistakable: The vice presidents, who had always wielded the real day-to-day power at A&M, were out, and the deans and the faculty were in. The old way of doing things, in which the vice presidents made decisions and then informed the deans, was history. A year and a half later, when I began reporting this story, people were still talking about the event.
"The university's mission, our mantra, is teaching, research, and service," Gates told me. "Not administration. Academics needs to drive the decision-making process." He talks without equivocation. In the movies, you've seen spy chiefs who view the world in a black and white way and spy chiefs for whom everything is an uncertain gray. Gates is a black and white guy. He even dresses the part: black suit with faint stripes, white shirt, black tie with white dots, silver hair. We met for over an hour, during which he hardly moved. His eyes are his most powerful feature. I tried to discern their color across the table but could make out only dark impenetrable swirls.
Gates came to the presidency by way of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, at which he had agreed, with some reluctance, to serve as interim dean at the request of his friend, General Brent Scowcroft, who had been the national security chief in the Bush administration. When he was first approached by the search committee as a possible successor to Ray Bowen, Gates declined in words that he would only describe as "'absolutely not,' except stronger." At age 58, after 26 years with the CIA, he was ready to spend time near his family in the Seattle area. But after 9/11, he says, he felt the tug to do one more tour of public service. The choice for president came down to Gates or former U.S. senator (and former Aggie economics professor) Phil Gramm, and on the board of regents, it was seen as a battle between Bush loyalists and Governor Rick Perry. To the relief of most of the faculty, the former won.
A&M presidents have been known to have problems with regents and influential former students, but Gates is in a strong position. He doesn't owe Perry anything, since he wasn't the governor's candidate. He isn't an Aggie, as a number of A&M presidents have been, so he doesn't have to worry that making changes might cause his lifelong friends to stop speaking to him. And then there are two photographs on his wall that he likes to show visitors. One is of his home 85 miles north of Seattle, in the mountains. Another is of his summer home, on Orcas Island, in Puget Sound. "If people start meddling with him," an old Aggie hand told me, "he can say, 'Take this job and shove it.'" Or, as Gates put it to me, gesturing at the photographs, "I'll just go back to heaven."
Gates addressed one long-running controversy after the 2002 football season by reassigning coach R. C. Slocum, and he has undertaken two major initiatives—rebuilding A&M's decimated faculty and increasing ethnic diversity without affirmative action—by which his presidency will ultimately be judged. Neither will be easy. Gates wants to add almost 450 new professors—112 in engineering alone, at an initial cost (including laboratories) of half a million dollars each, plus four new engineering buildings that will carry a price tag of $40 million each. The tab for failing to attract more minority students could also be expensive. State senator Royce West, of Dallas, who is African American, hinted that he might inject himself into the school's athletic recruiting. "If A&M won't admit my students who want to be engineers, they can't have my quarterbacks," West told me. "If A&M won't admit my teachers, they can't have my point guards."
But most of what Gates has done is not the stuff of headlines: new organizational charts, staff layoffs to make ends meet, high-level personnel changes, simplification of the Vision 2020 goals from twelve to four. What insiders noticed was that they were all shrewd moves, especially for a CIA careerist with little firsthand knowledge of universities, particularly this university. He won over the faculty with a reorganization scheme that ensures, in his words, that "academic priorities will provide the framework for all decision making," something that should have been the case at A&M long ago. He has no bigger fan than Martha Loudder, an accounting professor who is the Speaker of the Faculty Senate. Gates attends senate meetings and invites Loudder to his weekly staff meetings. "I'd walk through fire for that man," she says.
His CIA experience, Gates says, turned out to be perfect training for a university presidency. "I spent an entire career looking at the difference between what people said and what they did," he told me. Then he reeled off the things that Texas A&M and the CIA have in common: "They are both large public institutions. They are filled with people who were there before you came and will be there after you leave. If you want to have real change, you have to have an inclusive process, so that somebody besides you will advocate it. Both have very strong internal cultures based upon loyalty to each other. And both absolutely believe that nobody on the outside understands them."
And, he might have added, both cultures are resistant to change. "There's a general feeling on the part of alumni, faculty, and students that there has never been so much change here," he said. "It's clearly a concern among students that it's too much. They are very concerned that A&M not become like other universities. They question whether I can take A&M to the next level and still keep what makes A&M unique. I tell them that A&M undertook revolutionary change in the sixties. It admitted women, it ended compulsory membership in the Corps, it integrated the student body, and still preserved what makes A&M special. Why do you think we can't do it now?"
"What's their answer?" I asked. "They say nobody says 'Howdy' anymore," Gates said. "If they put down their cell phones, it would help."
I wish to express in this letter . . . my extreme disappointment with your decision, announced on December 3, not to use race as a factor in recruiting students to TAMU. Your policy choice is particularly problematic given the Supreme Court's recent decision on affirmative action authorizing universities to use race as one among many criteria to recruit students. As I see it, the issue before us was whether TAMU was going to maintain its image as "Crackerland" (as some people at elite institutions of higher learning mockingly refer to Aggieland), or venture to craft a university in the spirit of openness, diversity, and liberalism (in the philosophical sense of the word). Unfortunately, I am convinced that your decision will not help us shed our image as a backward and conservative institution where people care more about football than academics and where Aggies have no problem being ridiculed in jokes for being stupid.
—LETTER FROM AN A&M PROFESSOR TO PRESIDENT ROBERT GATES, DECEMBER 2003
WHEN THE SUPREME COURT BLESSED affirmative action last summer, proponents of adopting the policy at Texas A&M had high expectations. Gates, after all, had made good on his vow to be an agent of change, and diversity was one of the four goals of Vision 2020 he had singled out for attention. To show their support, a group of faculty members formed an organization called Faculty Committed to an Inclusive Campus. All that remained was for Gates to announce the new admissions policy, as UT and Rice had done before him. But when the announcement came, in early December, it was the old policy under Hopwood: "Admission to Texas A&M will continue to be a competitive process, in which personal merit—individual achievement, leadership potential, and personal strengths—is the only criterion for admission."
Gates did add a couple of new twists. He promised that the university would try to get more minority students to apply and try to get more of those who were accepted to attend. Deans, professors, administrators, even Gates himself would make phone calls. Currently, 62 percent of white students who are admitted actually enroll at A&M, compared with 48 percent of Hispanics and 44 percent of African Americans. If A&M can raise its "yield"—that is, the enrollment rate—among minority applicants to match UT's level (59 and 60 percent, respectively), Gates told me, A&M will have turned the corner.
This new approach isn't really new, which is why the odds are that it won't work. It represents what A&M has been doing since the Hopwood case, with little to show for it. (Current undergraduate minority enrollment is 9 percent Hispanic and 2 percent African American.) The university has permanent admissions offices in Dallas, San Antonio, and the Rio Grande Valley, with Houston and possibly Laredo to follow. The problem isn't lack of trying; it's lack of prospects. Of the 28,295 African American high school graduates in Texas in 2001, the most recent year for which figures are available, only 1,226 met A&M's admissions criteria—and everybody wants them. UT. Rice. Harvard. Stanford. Some will end up going to a college closer to home: the University of Houston, perhaps, or UT-Arlington. Some will prefer to attend a predominantly black school, such as Prairie View or Texas Southern. The pool of qualified applicants is larger for Hispanics (3,462), but the competition among the top schools is the same, and so is the incentive to stay close to home.
Affirmative action, of course, is a controversial policy. It is discrimination based on race that is sanctioned by government. The reason that universities with high admissions standards embrace affirmative action is not because they are blind to its deficiencies but because nothing else works. The pool is too small. If what A&M plans to do had achieved success elsewhere, everybody would be doing it instead of affirmative action. The one thing just about everybody in higher education—including Robert Gates—believes is that they have an obligation to do something, particularly at a public institution, to serve all of the people of their state and to produce future leaders from all races. "The reality we all must accept is that the alternative to change is stagnation and decline," he has said. "The reality we all must accept is that we must do a better job of meeting our obligations and responsibilities to all of the citizens of the state of Texas in preparing its students for a changed world. This is not political correctness. This is political realism."
