The
executive session was relatively short as these things go. For anyone not
privileged to stay in the meeting room—which meant practically anyone
except the Regents, the Board Secretary, Admiral McRaven himself and the
lawyers. There was a weird echo from behind the closed door. It was a brief outbreak of
laughter. Then a return to open session and the announcement that Chancellor
McRaven would be leaving his post at the end of the coming semester.
If
there were any doubts that this was an orchestrated departure, from a
$100,000-a-month position, those were dispelled in the following moments.
Regents Chairman Sara Martinez Tucker said in her remarks that she had already
formed a search committee for a new chancellor. McRaven confirmed suspicions
when he said he was leaving office for “health reasons” which is the preferred
excuse for departures in every endeavor from education to business to
government. Admiral McRaven took a step further and in his only public
recognition that his performance in office may have been lacking when he
suggested that the new chancellor, whoever that may be, arrive soon enough to be
better prepared than McRaven himself was when, after being appointed, he faced
almost immediate exposure to a very critical Texas Legislature and made a
mistake that doomed his tenure. That was the chain of circumstances sealing his
fate but another error may be the real reason a military officer was not the
best choice for the job.
Texas
Monthly recently described an inner struggle at the University of
Texas over whether the System office, where Admiral McRaven presides, should
merely be a hub of the component institutions or their heart and brain. While
that is not the reason William McRaven lost his position it's still a useful
point of departure for discussing what the University of Texas has become or
will become. Lurking in the background is a 400-pound gorilla—not actually in
the room but not far away—the University of California, with ten
campuses, including world-famous UCLA and Berkeley, and 240,000 students and
which has become the standard by which state schools are now evaluated,
including the University of Texas. In recent years UC has veered from one
crisis to another and UC President Janet Napolitano (who herself, like Admiral
McRaven, was a high-profile hire from the gun-toting wing of the Obama
Administration) has been taken to the woodshed so many times—by state
legislators, auditors and her own board of regents—that she must think the
woodshed is home. While UT has produced one or two high-profile scandals in
McRaven’s three-year tenure, in five years Napolitano-watchers have lost
count.
Just
in the last year the bad press for UC has included revelations that System
Offices, led by the UC General Counsel, approved instructions to the campuses
to falsify replies to a State Auditor’s investigation. Students have complained
about high administrators’ salaries and the press had already revealed
extravagantly-expensive Regents parties paid for by the public, in the context
of rising tuition. For the UT Regents the implications are bad too. The Los
Angeles Times published a study last year showing UT System
not far behind UC System’s top-heaviness and high administrative expenses. It’s
also instructive that Janet Napolitano’s predecessor at UC Office of the
President in Oakland was former UT System head Mark Yudof, a McRaven predecessor, who also resigned at UC for “health reasons” that overcame him after a few years in California, as UC's
then-Regents chair and Hollywood producer Sherry Lansing explained at the time.
Yudof was previously reprimanded by his own board for reckless personal
spending from public funds and since leaving office, after merely seven years
as a UC employee, has been revealed to be receiving a $357,000 a year pension
from Oakland, in addition to whatever he’s getting from UT, which is secret. Former President Yudof, who was Chancellor in Austin for 6 years, only angered California lawmakers further when he said,
speaking of his big retirement, “That is the way it works in the real
world.” Let them eat cake, in other words. The new head of UC’s internal
watchdog is a former official of the Los Angeles Police Department, a hire that
gives an idea of the ethical jeopardy that the leadership of the world’s
premier public university now finds itself in. That is the example UT seems to be following.
The San Francisco campus—devoted to healthcare and which has
become a hotbed of complaints of racism and sexism—recently exported
several top officials to UT’s new Dell Medical School in Austin, including our new med dean. The S.F.
campus, by the way, just signed a consent decree with the Office of Civil
Rights. UT's ethical guidelines were actually imported from UC: That’s the role
model for establishing a world-class
university and that’s the context in which Admiral McRaven’s tenure must be
measured, since it is UC he has tried to emulate at UT. The issues are
different in Austin than in Oakland where the ethical decay is far more advanced, but the question
is the same. What to think: is System the brain or just part of the body?
A
former SEAL who said he served with the Chancellor when Bill McRaven was just a
lieutenant commander and executive officer of Seal Team 1, in California, back
in the day, described the young naval officer, not long graduated from UT, as “low-key,
stable and focused, too focused for me.” This former SEAL seemed not to like
his former superior officer but to respect him—and said it was clear even then,
three decades ago, that William McRaven would reach higher command, if he
didn’t get killed first. The ex-subordinate who did not stay in the Navy for
America’s then-coming wars, when special forces would be in such high demand,
said his own preference was for the “wild-men” of the early SEALs, a golden age of
crazy big-balled risk-takers who have presumably been replaced by the more
cerebral, better-educated and better-trained practitioners like UT’s departing
leader. Bill McRaven has not only read books, he wrote one, on commando
operations, while still in service. He followed up recently while serving as
chancellor of UT with a bestseller (Make Your Bed) on how to face life’s
challenges as a SEAL might. The book is part-self help part-The Art of War
and has a narrative line entirely devoted to not giving up. The
likelihood that what the Admiral says he is now doing, leaving his post because
of health issues or because of the desire to travel and write, seems highly doubtful,
if only because of the money. He is paid more than three thousand dollars a
day, rain or shine, seven days a week, just for being at the helm, you might
say, and was recently ranked by the Chronicle of Higher Education as
the second highest paid university executive in the country. Not that there's
anything wrong with that.
In
person McRaven is a big guy, well over six feet which is said to be a
distinct disadvantage in special ops where most of the
practitioners are smaller, compact guys and presumably girls whose bodies are
more amenable to the physics that the job requires. Or so it is said. (The SEALs are also said to be
an odd environment where big men actually are picked on, at least in early
training.) Anyway he looked healthy enough at the Regents meeting, when he
resigned, for someone who is now complaining of leukemia. To reverse typecast
McRaven he resembles the actor who played him in the movie. He's a good-looking
guy. Historically the natural comparison is to another Texan who was also a
Navy officer, Chester Nimitz, born a few minutes from where Bill McRaven spent
his military brat childhood in San Antonio. Admiral Nimitz traveled the ocean in a submarine, as
commander of the Pacific Fleet and principal strategist in taking down the
Empire of Japan. At the end of the war Nimitz parked his sub in San
Francisco Bay and retired to a seat on the UC Board of Regents where he was instrumental
in creating the science-military-healthcare nexus that everyone including UT
now wants to copy. A transition to academia seems particularly popular among
former military leaders, with Dwight Eisenhower at Columbia University, for
example, between his service as Supreme Allied Commander and President of the
United States.
Whether it was the right transition for Admiral McRaven is
the debate. He is after all a killer by profession, best known for an
assassination, no matter how necessary it may have been. Admiral Nimitz also
took part in an assassination, actually, America’s last really big hit before
Bin Laden, or the last one we know about—of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, Nimitz’s
opposite number in the Imperial Navy, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor
and whom the U.S. needed out of play if the U.S. Pacific Fleet was
going to have its way. That was one of many aspects of Nimitz’s
extraordinary career, including a stint as a young professor at UC Berkeley.
While killing or capturing individuals has been McRaven’s bread and butter.
Nimitz was a strategist while McRaven’s expertise is more tactical in nature.
At UT, in short, he was hired as a strategist but may have continued to perform
as a tactician.
The
best description of the difference between strategy and tactics in the context
of William McRaven’s leadership actually comes from his time in Washington and
is related by another Texan, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who
was, by the way, a very successful president of Texas A&M University before
being summoned to D.C. to rescue the war in Iraq. In his memoir (Duty)
Secretary Gates describes the lead-up to the Bin Laden raid, which at first he opposed. What gave Secretary Gates misgivings, before signing on, was making a
bad strategic decision and he pointed to Adm. McRaven for an
example of potentially short-sighted tactical thinking.
While he noted that McRaven’s people were well-versed in just this kind of commando operation, having done much the same thing across Afghanistan “and elsewhere,” which meant also in Pakistan one supposes, this time would be different, not in a remote area but in an urban environment. “The worst-case scenario was that the Pakistanis could get a number of troops to the compound quickly, prevent extraction of our team, and take them prisoner,” Gates wrote. “When I asked Vice Admiral McRaven what he planned to do if the Pakistani military showed up during the operation, he said the team would just hunker down and wait for a ‘diplomatic extraction.’” That is the difference between a strategic view and tactical focus. McRaven’s tactical brilliance in Pakistan worked, while the strategic one in Texas did not. Using over two hundred million dollars in public funds and completely below the radar, as if it were a secret operation, which it was, he purchased land for a freshly-conceived but un-debated new campus in Houston. Unlike in Pakistan the bad guys showed up, in the form of legislators in league with the state’s existing higher education mafia. There are no diplomatic extractions at the Texas Legislature. Your cold lifeless body just washes up under the Congress Avenue bridge. William McRaven is a very-talented guy but the idea that he should be appointed leader of the University of Texas as a reward for his service with the Navy, or that in order to be a world-ranked school UT must have a high-profile leader, is probably an idea whose time has come and gone. That was the thinking that governed Janet Napolitano’s selection in Oakland, after all. In Austin it was the wrong job for the right guy, you might say.
Regardless, Bill McRaven will land on his feet. He has
previously been criticized by his contemporaries in Army special forces, for
being a publicity hound, but that may be where his real contribution lies,
speaking out. He has an important story to tell. In his most recent book
he mentions in passing that for a time his men were Saddam Hussein’s jailers
and among his own responsibilities was to visit the former dictator every day. That
is the book he needs to write. It’s unclear if the same prohibitions that
bar talking about the Bin Laden raid apply to Hussein’s imprisonment but
Admiral McRaven was in a privileged position to understand exactly what the
U.S. did in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, and to describe evil up close, Hussein’s and our own. The title is already a gimme: Conversations with
Saddam.
That's if Admiral McRaven’s health holds up. The former SEAL who served
with him said something scary. Even though this former commando did not
stay in the service, he kept in touch with buddies who did. A few of them have
died, this ex-SEAL said, “of something they picked up,” in Iraq or in Afghanistan.
There were no weapons of mass destruction like nukes, but there were apparently lingering
biological and chemical threats. What may terminate Admiral McRaven’s still
promising career is something he walked through in Afghanistan not something he
stepped in, in Austin.
