Texas A&M Must Have a Visionary Leader

Embrace the Cult of Raving Fans

Our beloved university was in the news recently over the botched hiring and then non-hiring of a DEI / Marxist-aligned professor to head a renewed journalism department. Texas A&M’s president, Katherine Banks, attempted to be responsive to stakeholders and Texas taxpayers by tapping the brakes on the terms of the professor’s employment, only to be ambushed by faculty leaders who mounted their own media-aligned pressure campaign, with the usual kvetching about the various systemic “isms” and sob stories to friendly outlets. As a result of this pressure, she resigned.

I do not personally know the former president, but my impressions of her biography are generally positive. She is from rural Kentucky, educated as an engineer, married to an agriculture professor, and despite a demanding career did not sacrifice her genotype for the sake of her phenotype and brought six children into the world. These strike me as hard-to-fake signals that she is, as I like to say, a “conservative in her bones” and indeed she pulled the university back from the brink of alienating its core constituents in many areas after the disastrous administration of her predecessor.

Her barely two-year tenure, however, shows the limitations of leaders who think they can avoid controversy in reforming Left-biased academia back to the center. Texas A&M’s next leader must be ready for the long march back through this institution.

This is not only the right thing to do but presents an enormous opportunity for the university with the right entrepreneurially-minded vision.

What It Means to Have a Strategically Effective Vision

The word “vision” gets thrown around a lot in leadership circles. The concept is useless if it refers to general leadership competence: people skills, motivational skills, time management, that sort of thing; that’s table stakes in leading a large organization. A vision is only strategically effective if it incorporates novel, non-generic directives that cannot be easily copied by competitors.

In A&M’s case, appealing to the broad center through meritocratic, politically neutral policies is effective because much of the competition is politically captive to Left ideology that sees political neutrality as morally equivalent to violence. Their inability to adapt leaves massive opportunities on the table for the next leader of Texas A&M.

Secular Market Declines in Education

The need for this kind of vision is urgent in higher education because the market is receding.

The fundamental market fact for anyone in education today is that declining birthrates starting in 2008 have vastly shrunk the future student population. Demography is destiny, an almost perfect lens into the future, as the maximum student population 18 years from now consists of the babies born today.

Compounding this trend are fewer students attending college due to an increasingly dubious cost-to-benefit ratio. Truck drivers make more than MBAs, and at a $30,000 estimated annual cost for in-state schools, many potential students are questioning the value of a college diploma.

It is a mathematical law that leaders who wish to maintain or grow in a shrinking market must grow their market share. There is no longer a rising tide to raise all boats.

Growing market share requires organizations to identify a “Unique Selling Proposition” that marks their offering as superior to alternatives: usually, better, faster, or cheaper. Since college education is a positional good, competing on speed and price is somewhat self-defeating (though freezing tuition would be a smart move to force efficiency gains through the system). Quality is somewhat relative, as colleges compete among multiple dimensions for families. Many institutions of higher learning will struggle to find a viable USP and many will decline or close.

Texas A&M, however, is uniquely gifted in having a cult-like following among its literal raving fans. For many Aggies, there is no other school that can possibly be considered. Aggieland Outfitters has a large section devoted to infants and children with merchandise like this:

The Most Valuable Large Brand in Education

This kind of brand loyalty is the stuff of corporate dreams. The customer is loyal, even myopic, seeing no viable alternatives, and largely price insensitive (see, for example, College Station real estate prices).

The #1 rule when your brand reaches cult status is don’t tick off the cult. During the late unpleasantness of 2020, the university came perilously close to a Bud Light moment when they almost caved and removed the iconic Sul Ross statue at the center of campus.

Alumni who intervened to stop it, far from constituting “external pressure,” saved the university from undermining the most valuable brand in education. If we think it can’t happen to A&M, ask the US military about its current recruiting crisis, as families with generations of service advise their kids to avoid the increasingly ideological armed services.

The Texas A&M Brand Identity Resonates With the Only Growing Segments in an Overall Declining Market

Building from a loyal base, an entrepreneurial leader at A&M would want to grow market share by appealing to those segments of the market that are still growing or at least shrinking at a slower pace.

Recent research derived from the United States General Social Survey quantifies fertility by IQ and political orientation. The following graph shows expected fertility versus IQ scores (estimated by the highly g-correlated WORDSUM 10-item vocabulary test, and normalized with a zero mean as a proportion of standard deviation):

The smarter the population cohort, the more a liberal political orientation depresses fertility. For selective universities, the relevant parts of the graph are those to the far right, which correspond to IQs above average (Wordsum > 0) through 2 standard deviations above (~98th percentile). At this level, conservatives and centrists are having children at rates 40-90% higher than liberals. With up to 20% of Gen Z now identifying with biologically non-procreative sexualities, and 25% planning to never have children, the association between fertility and religiousness/conservatism will only accelerate.

Other research confirms this claim. For example, religious attendance by state is highly correlated with fertility:

The Institute for Family Studies has further found that young conservative women have on average around 2.4 children (growing, above replacement), whereas young liberal women have around 1.5:

Note that the last year of this study is 2018, before post-2020 accelerations and polarization in social trends. This gap is likely larger and growing.

This younger cohort of women was at a midpoint age of 37 in 2018, and if we assume an average age of a first child of 27, this accelerating divergence will begin to show up in student populations no later than among children born in 2008, today’s high school freshmen and sophomores who will enter college beginning in 2026-2027.

The Growth Segments Are Underserved

This fast-growing segment of the market is currently severely underserved in the college marketplace. Commentator Aaron Renn has documented the success of Hillsdale College as one of the few places where smart, conservative, religious students feel well-served. Hillsdale now has an SAT exceeding A&M by 100 points, and the homeschool-focused Patrick Henry College is similarly situated; both are able to achieve surprisingly selective admissions rates.

Many formerly selective Christian colleges, such as Wheaton and Calvin, serve up baptized wokeness that doesn’t provide compelling value for these families in quality or cost, besides their weakness in providing a vocationally useful education for after-college student earnings, a huge advantage for a potentially non-woke, meritocratic Texas A&M. These families don’t ask for much. They want meritocracy, neutrality in the culture wars, and space and tolerance for their values.

Embrace the Core Aggie Identity

In my own assessment of college options, the A&M alumni base very much fits this growth segment.

A&M has some of the highest marriage rates and average earnings among its graduates. While we don’t have data on the fertility of Aggies, it’s a reasonable assumption it would follow similar patterns, with the most conservative segments having more children.

Fortunately for A&M, the existing, though tarnishing, brand image of the university is already seen as friendly to the fastest-growing segment of future student populations. It’s seen as a place where conservative, religious students can find a critical mass of like-minded people in a culture compatible with (but not explicitly endorsing) their values.

If A&M will lean in and enhance this perception with policies, practices, and personnel that embrace its Unique Selling Proposition, and reject DEI politics masquerading as scholarship, it can grow and prosper despite overall market declines in student populations.

Advice for Texas A&M’s Next Leader

To capture these market opportunities, I would make the following recommendations to Texas A&M’s next leader:

1. The job to be done will require years of effort. The next leader must be ready for a decade-long career capstone, doing the right thing despite the inevitable resistance and institutional inertia. Study Mitch Daniels’ post-gubernatorial success at Purdue.

2. Recent legislation, court rulings, and public opinion give you the “Mandate of Heaven” to make massive changes to the university to protect its future and reputation. The people of Texas, through their representatives, have banned DEI in all public universities. The Supreme Court has committed itself to a race-neutral interpretation of the 14th Amendment. A majority of Americans, including a plurality of black Americans, oppose race-based preferences. Those who would oppose these changes represent a small minority increasingly out-of-step with public opinion and settled jurisprudence. It is your duty as a fiduciary to bring the university into strict compliance with state and federal law.

3. Employ a “Wayne Gretsky” legal strategy; skate to where the puck will be, and comply with more than the bare minimum, but where legal requirements are likely to move in a few short years. The Supreme Court did far more than overturn affirmative action; it also explicitly confirmed a strict race-neutral interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Recent federal rulings are already anticipating wide implications beyond college admissions. The university’s legal counsel needs to outline the broadest interpretation of race-neutral policies, including “hostile work environment” type claims that may be lodged by students targeted because of their perceived privilege. If the university’s current attorneys are backward in their thinking on this, find more forward-looking counsel. A broad-based interpretation as official policy, promulgated to all parts of the university, will make your job easier and help facilitate voluntary compliance among mostly risk-averse academics. Non-compliance with official policy, as a violation of civil rights law, should be considered “gross misconduct” in violation of tenure or other employment contracts. Every employee of the university needs to know that any violation of race-neutral policies, including the pseudo-scholarly stigmatizing of white, Christian, and/or heterosexual students, can result in significant liability for the university among a body of law and jury pools disgusted by these policies and risks their future employment. The plaintiff’s attorneys smell blood and are just getting started.

4. You must have aligned leaders you can trust. It seems one of President Banks’ mistakes was allowing the hiring of a department head without having an aligned leader under her. When the dean made a severe error in judgment in recruiting a DEI-aligned department head, Banks was forced to intervene after job offers had been made. This was still the right thing to do, but a better approach would have been to avoid all significant hiring in any college or department until the right leaders are in place who will zealously follow the letter and spirit of a race-neutral realignment, including faculty selection.

5. It may be the case that this requires hiring fair leaders who are personally conservative. There are few “honest” liberals left, by which I mean those who value open inquiry and tolerance for other opinions. Much of the Left has gone all-in on DEI, which rejects evidence-based approaches to scholarship with an imperative that all inequalities are due to oppression and considers opinions to the contrary morally equivalent to physical violence. From a critical theory perspective, the TAMU core values (loyalty, integrity, excellence, leadership, respect, and selfless service) are all “oppressor values” that attempt to deceive oppressed groups with a false consciousness to justify their oppression. This is a fundamental conflict that requires extreme prudence in selecting leaders.

6. When DEI hard-liners resign in protest, let them. Nearly all of them are in soft fields with a surplus of underemployed Ph.D.s. It’s not the chemical engineering professor with a lucrative patent portfolio and alternative private-sector employment options that’s pushing for this stuff.

7. In implementing these changes, expect negative media attention. Attacks just mean you’re over the target. The more effective the efforts, the worse the attention will become, though artfulness in choosing the right leaders to do the work quietly can help minimize it. This was President Banks’ fundamental mistake; had she held on for a few more days, the news cycle would have moved on to Hunter Biden’s plea deal and UFOs. Texas A&M’s next leader must have the capacity to ignore media pressure until short attention spans move to the next fake outrage. A visionary, forward-looking leader also needs to know the numbers when it comes to the “mainstream” media, which serves smaller and smaller audiences. They are paper tigers who represent a tiny percentage of the population. CNN averages something like 500,000 primetime viewers, many in airports and waiting rooms. Tucker Carlson’s show used to average 3 million, and Joe Rogan averages 11 million listens per episode. On Twitter, Carlson, perceived as far right, is objectively mainstream in that he now dwarfs both CNN and MSNBC’s audiences with hundreds of millions of views. The legacy media represent a small constituency, and what they call the “right” is actually the center, objectively defined. Scrutiny and criticism will come no matter what you do; the smart, selflessly serving leader chooses the path that enhances the institution’s reputation with its core constituency rather than his or her own among a tiny, implacable group of East Coast media types who are not your customer and would consider attending somewhere like Texas A&M, woke or not, equivalent to social death.

8. Move quickly and flood the zone to disrupt the media’s OODA loop in the 2024 media circus. The spectacle of the 2024 Presidential race will provide much cover to fire, defund, shut down, and hire as necessary while the media’s attention is largely focused elsewhere.

9. Embrace the new center. DEI and other silliness can be seen as residual decadence of the dying East Coast economy, as six Sunbelt states— Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee— now contribute more to national GDP than the entire Northeast Corridor of the six New England states plus New York and New Jersey. The people of Texas have supported economic policies that reward and encourage productivity and Texas is now the growth center of the United States economy. Texas A&M is the flagship institution of the productive arts that built the economic powerhouse of our state. The Texas approach is winning, and it’s time to stop apologizing for it. Boldly proclaim a post-woke brand identity focused on, as the Mays Business School puts it, “advancing prosperity” through meritocracy rather than the zero-sum, loser, scarcity mentality of these economically fading regions. Look to the future, let the dead bury the dead.

10. Know that implementing this vision is not only smart but the right thing to do. If we know anything from the psychological literature, it’s that the most effective therapy modalities enhance the patient’s sense of agency, which is especially necessary in adverse circumstances. Teaching students of any background that they are victims of unseen forces and cannot succeed because of this is cruel and psychologically crippling.

11. In all things, remember your core cult of raving fans. As Bud Light and Target learned, in today’s hyper-connected world brand trust earned over decades can be lost in an instant. If ever in doubt, ask yourself, “What would the people buying the Class of 2045 onesies want me to do in this situation?”