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A&M in danger of never achieving its vast potential

Today's governance crisis at Texas A&M is extremely serious. It may be the most important crisis the university has faced since A&M President Earl Rudder's challenge to the status quo 50 years ago.

Today's crisis really isn't about Elsa Murano, who has announced her intention to resign as president, or for that matter, Chancellor Mike McKinney.

It is about whether an academic institution of almost 50,000 students and 250,000 former students -- a member of the Association of American Universities -- deserves the freedom to aspire to better things and to manage itself as an institution of higher education.

We are presented with a stark reality: an all powerful "system," run by political appointees, without legislative oversight, who wish to unilaterally politicize and "corporatize" decision-making structure and staffing to their own, and to their political friends', advantage.

Texas A&M University is the flagship university of The Texas A&M System. It is the oldest public educational institution in the state. It has almost half of the undergraduate students, as well as virtually all the graduate programs and graduate students, and is responsible for most of the research, in the A&M System.

It is the only Tier 1 comprehensive research university in the A&M System and one of only three in the state. Yet, today we find the university being taken over by the A&M System, the system the university spawned in 1948.

Nothing could be clearer than the chancellor's words in a recently released evaluation of President Murano: Murano "built her administrative team to do her instructions. Not team supportive of Ideals of BOR (or ideas of BOR)." McKinney rated Murano 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the worst.

Nothing could be clearer than the chancellor's words in a recently released evaluation of President Murano: Murano "built her administrative team to do her instructions. Not team supportive of Ideals of BOR (or ideas of BOR)." McKinney rated Murano 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the worst.

President Murano was president of the flagship. The chancellor's job has always been to worry about the A&M System, not about the university. The chancellor's job has always been a staff job, essentially an extension of the Board of Regents -- necessary staff support given the scale and scope of the system and physically and contextually remote from the system institutions themselves.

There are presidents -- "chief executives" -- of every institution in the system -- all 11 universities, seven state agencies, and the Health Science Center. The president of Texas A&M has always been a line job, the biggest job in the system.

And yet, the system's organizational chart puts, incredibly, the governor in the top spot for the system, the Board of Regents next, the chancellor next, and the president of Texas A&M at the same level as the chancellor's chief of staff, the vice chancellors for agriculture and budgets and accounting, and the presidents of campuses at Texarkana, Commerce, Corpus Christi and Kingsville.

It is intervening in faculty compensation. And, it tolerates no dissent.

Want proof? Listen to the chancellor's own words on his concept of enlightened and shared governance: "There's nine people who can tell me what to do. I'll make my arguments to them. They argue, they listen and then they make a decision and I carry it out. You want shared governance? That's shared governance."

Or to those of Regent Gene Stallings: "A lot of that depends on Dr. Murano (on whether she can continue to work with the chancellor). She works for the chancellor. The chancellor doesn't work for her. Rank and file has its privilege. A colonel can't tell a general what to do. ... A chancellor's job is to run the system. A president's job is to please the chancellor."

So, today we have a Texas A&M System empowered by its regents -- all nine of whom are appointed by our current governor -- to make all critical decisions for the flagship university, as well -- presumably -- as for all of the other system universities. And, the regents have delegated that responsibility completely to one person, a non-educator, a politician who was not selected through a national or even regional search. One person agreed with himself that Chancellor McKinney was the choice: his former boss, Gov. Rick Perry, for whom he had served a stint as chief of staff.

No, this crisis is about whether the faculty, staff, students, former students and the broad and diverse community that make up Texas A&M University will allow a handful of politically motivated persons who do not understand their fiduciary duty either to the institution or to the citizens of the state to take over this wonderful, heavy-duty public university -- this sacred public trust.

If they are successful, Texas and its citizens can kiss a unique American institution goodbye. It will have no chance of ever achieving its vast potential.

* A 1958 graduate of Texas A&M University, Jon L. Hagler is a partner in the Boston investment firm of Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo & Co. He served as board chairman of the Texas A&M Foundation in 1999-2000 and was named a Distinguished Alumnus of A&M in 1999. He served as co-chairman of Vision 2020 with A&M President Ray Bowen.