Free A Passion for Leadership by Robert M Gates Page A

respect to race-blind admissions, most minority leaders figured the new approach was just a dodge to avoid increasing the number of minority kids and evidence of hostility at A&M to minorities.
    Within days of my public announcement, I was summoned to the state capitol to meet with a dozen or so legislators who came from racial minorities. They lambasted me in the most graphic terms for the better part of two hours. Years of testifying before Congress had inured me to this kind of treatment, so I just sat and took it, repeatedly and politely reaffirming my commitment to bring more minorities to Texas A&M. I didn’t make much of a dent in their anger. One very powerful African-American state senator, Royce West of Dallas, who had been impressed with how I had quickly responded to his criticism of A&M’s poor record in using minority-owned businesses, berated me publicly and stated his disagreement with my decision. Privately, however, he said he wanted to help and told other minority leaders around the state that I should be given a chance to succeed. He invited me to Dallas to talk with minority community activists and the editorial board of
The Dallas Morning News,
in both cases accompanying me and introducing me. He repeatedly avowed that I had delivered on what I had promised in the past and he had confidence I would do so again. I will never forget his confidence and his willingness to take a risk by supporting me. He helped buy me the time I needed to make my strategy work.
    Sixteen months after arriving on campus, I implemented a tailored strategy for increasing diversity at A&M: rejecting the use of both affirmative action and legacy, and allocating millions of dollars to a unique and aggressive recruitment effort. The strategy was controversial among both external and internal audiences. But sometimes a leader must decide what is in the best long-term interest of the institution, suck it up, make a tough decision, put his head down, and plunge ahead—even if alone. I was convinced that if I was to meaningfully increase minority representation at A&M, I had to have an unorthodox strategy consistent with the institution’s culture. I was determined to convince Hispanics and African-Americans that I was dead serious about increasing their numbers in both the student body and the faculty and equally determined to persuade the university community that greater diversity was essential for Texas A&M’s stature and its future.
    I spent the next three years implementing that tailored strategy. It worked. By fall semester 2006, African-American freshman enrollment was up 77 percent from the fall of 2003; Hispanic freshman enrollment was up 59 percent. Our success in enrolling minorities, especially compared with a number of other major public universities nationwide where minority enrollment was declining in absolute terms, was recognized in a front-page article of
The Chronicle of Higher Education
and by the editorial board of the
Houston Chronicle.
(Between 2002, before I launched my initiative, and 2012, African-American and Hispanic undergraduates at Texas A&M increased from 10.6 percent of the student body to 23.6 percent, a major step forward, though there is room for continued improvement.)
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    My priorities when I became secretary of defense—getting more troops into the war zones, getting them the equipment they needed to succeed in the missions they had been given, getting them home safely, and, if wounded, getting the best possible care for them—were not the priorities of the senior leaders in the Pentagon. They were preoccupied not with waging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but with planning and procuring equipment for future wars against major nation-states. I had to shape my strategy accordingly. The most immediate change I had to make, shocking to me, was to get the senior leadership focused on Iraq and Afghanistan.
    President Obama’s onetime White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said you should