Gates was agent of change at Texas A&M

Paul Burka, Texas Monthly:

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A man who will not compromise with the sun is a person to be reckoned with, and that is how Bob Gates has come to be viewed at Texas A&M. As the university’s twenty-second president, he is determined to leave his mark on the school as few previous leaders have done. One can infer from his CIA background that he is not easily dissuaded from his chosen course or prone to doubting his own powers of observation. And his chosen course is to change the way the world views Texas A&M, not to mention the way Texas A&M views itself.

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The branding campaign is only one of the ways in which Gates is trying to transform A&M. It is hard to come up with an area of the university that has escaped his gaze—or his action. The administration. The faculty. The athletics department. The Corps of Cadets. Minority admissions. Graduate programs. A new undergraduate degree program. How buildings ought to be utilized. How decisions get made. Even the food service. I can’t imagine a president of the University of Texas spending ten seconds of his term thinking about the food service. Gates canned the top five managers at A&M and hired replacements from Stanford. Why? He wants A&M’s students to be broadened by exposure to different cultures, and he thinks that new kinds of food are one way to do it. Perhaps it is not so surprising, these days, that A&M now serves sushi, but who would have thought the day would come when campus dining halls offered Soul Food Fridays? And coming soon are Organic Farmer’s Market Thursdays.

All of this transformation is occurring at a university that, deep down, has never wanted to be transformed and has always viewed change with a narrow range of emotions bracketed by suspicion and hostility. This article is my sixth story about Texas A&M in nine and a half years, and while the nominal subjects have been different, all stories about A&M have the same underlying theme: the need for the university to evolve, as seen by its leaders, and the continuing antipathy to change, as voiced by its present and former students. That the resistance is based upon affection—the unimaginable degree to which Aggies mate with their school for life and ask nothing more of it than that it remain the same as when they were students—does not make it less difficult to overcome. If anything, the opposite is true. Every Aggie is a self-appointed guardian of the Aggie spirit, eternally on the alert for signs of slippage.

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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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This is just a small taste of a long interesting article that hit the newsstands at about the same time that Gates nomination to be Secretary of Defense was announced. What is interesting about it is Gates focus on transformation at an institution that has resisted change and his winning of the faculty over to his side in the process. If he can do the same thing with transformation and the Generals at the Pentagon he will be a success in at least part of his mission.

Burka has been a writer for Texas Monthly since around the time it was started by a class mate of mine at the University of Texas School of Law in the early 1970's. He was also Sports Editor of the Daily Texan the semester before I took that job. He is a good writer and this story is worth reading for those interested in how Gates management style might fit in at the Pentagon.