Free A Passion for Leadership by Robert M Gates

that are broadly welcome, a leader creates a positive climate for further change. In doing so, he generates political capital and credibility for when he takes on the controversial or more difficult issues.
    This worked especially well for me at A&M. I felt strongly about creating a new undergraduate degree that would reflect twenty-first-century reality by allowing a student, with a faculty adviser’s oversight and approval, to design a degree program that cut across multiple colleges and disciplines. Because this kind of degree was new and nontraditional in that it involved several colleges and no specific major, there was substantial faculty skepticism. So I waited nearly three years to launch it, until I had built up considerable capital with the faculty by, among other things, implementing the program to hire hundreds more faculty and beginning construction of several hundred million dollars’ worth of new academic facilities. I named Elsa Murano, dean of the agriculture school, and Jerry Strawser, dean of the business school, to lead the task force studying the proposal and added as members several former speakers of the faculty senate who I knew would be supportive. It was still a tough slog, but ultimately the degree program was approved.
    To achieve especially challenging goals, a leader should always be prepared to tailor his reform strategy to the culture of the institution. This requires investing much thought in tactical creativity—as well as unorthodox approaches and the element of surprise—in developing strategies for implementation.
    My determination to increase diversity at A&M required just such a tailored, unorthodox strategy. While the number of minority students there had grown over the years, the percentages significantly lagged the changing demography of the state. I was determined to change this, but I knew I had to shape the initiative carefully to win broad support among conservative former (and current) students, the board of regents, and others important to the university. More than a few among them saw no value in greater on-campus diversity and certainly no value in spending money to achieve it. So, my strategy had to be designed specifically for Texas A&M and its culture.
    In December 2003, a few months after the Supreme Court approved limited use of affirmative action in college admissions, I announced a number of measures we would take to increase minority recruitment and enrollment. We would establish a statewide network of “prospective student centers”—permanent recruitment, admissions, and financial offices (with bilingual staff) in predominantly minority areas of major Texas cities and along the border with Mexico. I announced twenty-four hundred new four-year scholarships (six hundred per year) of $5,000 per year for first-generation college students who came from homes with $40,000 or less in family income. For families at that income level, we could stack other scholarships and grants so those students could go to A&M virtually free. Demographically, about two-thirds of those scholarships would go to minorities, the remainder to poor whites.
    At the same time, I announced A&M would not use affirmative action in the way it was being used at most universities, that is, assigning students extra “points” in the application score if they were of a certain ethnicity. Everyone would be admitted purely on the basis of individual merit. Most A&M students and alumni applauded the merit-only approach—until I announced a couple of days later that we would no longer use legacy (previous family attendance at A&M) as a factor in admissions. As I told the Aggies, we couldn’t have it both ways: purely merit-based admissions
and
legacy. The shit that hit the fan as a result of these combined admissions initiatives came from the media, minority leaders in Texas already deeply skeptical of the university’s commitment to greater diversity, some alumni, and a number of faculty. With