Stimulating. Transformative.
Daughter of the Cumberland

Just four weeks after John Sharp officially became chancellor of the Texas A&M University System in 2011, another key hire was made on the flagship campus in College Station.

M. Katherine Banks was named dean of the Texas A&M Dwight Lock College of Engineering, and a vice chancellor for the A&M System. Banks came to Texas from Indiana where she had served as head of the Civil Engineering Department at Purdue University. In that post, she had oversight of roughly 1,000 students and nearly 60 faculty members. At A&M, enrollment in the College of Engineering at the time of Banks’ hiring numbered nearly 11,000 students, with more than 400 tenured and tenure-track faculty included on the college’s staff.

In addition, as a vice chancellor of the A&M System, Banks also would serve as director of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, called “TEES,” and administer two other state agencies under A&M control: the Texas Engineering Extension Service, or “TEEX,” and the Texas Transportation Institute, known as ”TTI.”

Of the challenges presented by her multiple new duties at Texas A&M, Banks said at the time her hiring was announced, “My husband and I have six children, so we’re used to chaos.”

Kathy Banks says today she was intrigued when word first reached her about the open dean’s position at Texas A&M.

“I had been head of the Civil Engineering Department at Purdue for six years, and I was ready for a change,” she says. “I had a Fulbright grant lined up in Spain and was excited about that.

“When I saw the ad for the A&M job, I called the only person I knew there at the time, Robin Autenrieth.” Today Autenrieth is head of A&M’s Zachry Department of Civil and Environment Engineering, a valued colleague of Banks. “I told Robin I couldn’t quite figure out if this was a dean’s position or not, there were so many different components to the job description.

“She said, ‘Well, it’s pretty complicated.’ That got my attention. ‘Sounds interesting,’ I told her.

“‘It’s a very difficult job,’ she replied. ‘You wear a lot of hats. I don’t think you’d want it.’

“‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a look at it.’”

To know Kathy Banks is to understand she is always up for a challenge, as evidenced by the extraordinary list of her achievements at Texas A&M.

After further discussion with Autenrieth, Banks decided to submit her application for the A&M Engineering post. 

“My airport interview went rally well,” she says.

“Airport interviews” have become de rigueur in the selection of academic administrators from a nationwide pool of candidates. Applicants are flown into airports near the universities to which they are applying, and confidential meetings are conducted on sight. Often airport interviews are held sequentially on the same day, or on consecutive days, giving search committees an opportunity to meet multiple candidates in person.

As to what Banks thinks set her apart in that first interview, she says, “I think I was successful in helping them appreciate my fundraising skills.” An inspection of the new home of A&M Engineering, the Zachry Engineering Education Complex, opened in 2018, provides tangible proof of Banks’ ability to get things done…and paid for.

Ultimately, the committee seeking A&M’s new engineering dean narrowed the list of candidates to four. At about the same time, a Board of Regents search committee was completing its courtship of John Sharp to become the System’s new chancellor. Ultimately, the Regents would have the final vote on the hiring of the flagship’s new engineering dean, but a faculty committee would have a significant say in that selection.

Rival camps emerged. One group supported Banks, who had spent her entire career as an academic. Another, including prominent Former Students and a cadre of Regents, favored Stephen Holditch, then head of A&M’s petroleum engineering department, as the preferred choice to become the new dean.

Holditch, who died in the summer of 2019, was a lifelong Aggie. A member of the Class of ’69, he went to work in the oil business after graduation. He eventually took a leave of absence from a job in Houston with Shell Oil Company to pursue his Ph.D. from A&M. Upon achieving his doctorate, Holditch left Shell and joined the engineering faculty at his alma mater. At the same time, he established his own consulting firm.

He became a success in both pursuits.

As an academic, Holditch was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995. Two years later, his company was purchased by oil-industry giant Schlumberger, and transformed into Holditch Reservoir Technologies with the founder retained as an advisor.

The A&M Engineering dean’s position was vacated when G. Kemble Bennett, a popular and personable administrator known to all as “Kem,” stepped down after nine years at the post. Upon his departure in the summer of 2011, he admitted, "Resources are not at the level we've had in the past and there's no question cuts are going to have to be made. But I think the overall trajectory of the college remains upward."

With the after-effects of the Great Recession still being felt, tenured faculty members across the Texas A&M campus were in revolt over measures handed down by the System Board of Regents to “modernize” and economize how the university conducted its academic business.

Managing the state through lean financial times, Governor Rick Perry had become a strong proponent of reforms recommended by the Texas Public Policy Foundation called the “seven breakthrough solutions.” In essence, these sought to hold institutions of higher learning–and their faculty–to the same standards of financial accountability as those imposed by the free enterprise system. One recommendation included in the reforms was a cost-benefit analysis of instructors.

Then Texas A&M System Chancellor Mike McKinney, Rick Perry’s former chief of staff, ultimately lost favor among the flagship faculty for his support of the measures. This ultimately generated an unparalleled “no-confidence” vote in his performance from the A&M Faculty Senate.

McKinney’s struggles to manage the System through the global economic downturn played a significant part in his departure as chancellor in mid-2011.

The matter of Banks-versus-Holditch ultimately narrowed to the question of which candidate could most effectively improve the Engineering College’s economic circumstances.

Regent Phil Adams was a staunch Holditch supporter.

“There were several of us on the Board of Regents at the time who supported Steve,” Adams says today. “When I moved my office to the Metro Center in downtown Bryan, his consulting practice took up half the second floor. He had 50 or 60 employees. Many of them were petroleum engineers and geologists, highly-paid professionals who were doing a lot of important research. He had tremendous ties to the energy industry and I thought that would be a real financial plus for A&M.

“I had a very high regard for him,” Adams adds. “My mind was made up. I didn’t give Kathy Banks a chance.”

Adams was also a strong supporter of John Sharp as A&M System chancellor, but when Sharp took over, the new chancellor quickly chose to back Banks.

“She was the first major hire I was involved in,” Sharp says. “I wasn’t a part of the search committee, but the first time I met her I knew she was the kind of person that I like to deal with. She has big ideas. I would much rather work with employees who I have to pull the reigns back on than ones that I have to spur.”

Kathy Banks remembers her first meeting with Sharp.

“After we spent a little time getting acquainted he told me, simply, ‘Do great things.’ He took a big risk supporting me,” Banks says.

On her first meeting with Sharp after she was hired, the new chancellor presented her two dozen yellow roses in his office.

It’s what he does.

“I remember thinking,” Banks says, “‘This is going to be a different type of job because I can already tell this is a different kind of place.’”

With the support of Sharp, and the flagship’s top two administrators at the time, President Bowen Loftin and Provost Karen Watson, Banks got the job. Her first task as she assumed the Engineering helm in early 2012 was to win over those in a position of influence who had opposed her hiring.

Regent Phil Adams was at the top of that list.

“Phil is the consummate Texas gentleman,” Banks says. “and he’s passionate about what he believes in. Even though he may have been disappointed that I got the job, he did finally agree to meet with me.

“He didn’t really know me at the time, and so I sought to find common ground between us. That turned out to be my grandfather, who in his time shared the same staunchly conservative political leanings as Phil.

“I told Phil, ‘After my grandmother died when I was a teenager living in the small coal-mining town of Whitesburg, Kentucky, I would regularly clean house for my grandfather. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up, so I felt it my duty to help take care of him.

“‘At the end of the tiny living room in his home was a chair, and above that chair he had two pictures hung side by side. One picture was a depiction of Jesus. The other was then-California governor Ronald Reagan.

“‘I asked my grandfather, “Papaw, don’t you think that Jesus should be higher than Reagan?”

“‘“They’re fine the way they are,’ came my grandfather’s reply.”’”

“Phil loved that story,” Banks says.

“I give her a lot of credit for trying to meet with me after she had the job,” Adams says today. “If I’d been in her position, I don’t think I would have been as understanding and patient in attempting to bring me around to her side.

“I try not to be mean, or stubborn, or anything like that, but her office had contacted me two or three times and I didn’t return the calls. I just didn’t think she was the right choice as our dean.

“The calls kept coming, so finally I agreed to meet with her.”

That encounter took place in a small private room in the Clayton Williams Alumni Center. John Sharp had repeatedly assured Adams, “This woman thinks like we do.”

“I had marked off 30 minutes for the meeting and had other places I needed to be after that,” Adams recalls. “But after spending five minutes with Kathy, I didn’t want to let her go. She was extraordinary. She had the same concept of value creation that I did.

“I knew right then and there that she’d be good in business. She could run a company if she so desired. And she’d make a helluva dean for our school.”

In fact, it was that entrepreneurial savvy Banks picked up from her grandparents that not only helped her win Adams over, but also served her well in steering a new course for the A&M College of Engineering.

Her accomplishments, both before and after her arrival at Texas A&M are made even more remarkable considering she is a product of one of the most economically challenged places in the U.S.

The Cumberland Plateau region of Kentucky is a serrated upland in the western and southeastern part of the state. The plateau’s half million inhabitants are among the earth’s most interesting folk. Their European ancestry and American adventures constitute a remarkable page in the history of mankind.

Much of the region’s story is the story of coal. Coal has always cursed the land in which it lies. When men begin to wrest it from the earth it leaves a legacy of foul streams, hideous slag heaps and polluted air. It peoples this transformed land with blind and crippled men and with widows and orphans.

But the tragedy of the Kentucky mountains transcends the tragedy of coal. It is compounded of Indian wars, civil war and intestine feuds, of layered hatreds and of violent death.

Harry Caudill was a Whitesburg, Kentucky, attorney and legislator when he wrote these words as the introduction to his book Night Comes to the Cumberland, published in 1963. The book gained national attention and prompted President John Kennedy, who had campaigned heavily in the neighboring state of West Virginia, to create a commission to study conditions in the Appalachian and Cumberland regions.  Ultimately, billions of dollars in aid poured into the area over the next 25 years.

Margaret Katherine Banks was a three-year-old living in Whitesburg when Caudill’s book took the country by storm: daughter to Estill and Peggy Banks, sister to Estill II and Darrin, and granddaughter to Lucky and Kathryn Banks.

Kathy Banks remembers, too, her great grandmother, Lucky’s mother, Celia Ann Adams Banks, whom everyone called “Ma.” The woman’s “rebel spirit” has inspired and shaped Banks herself.
“Ma chewed tobacco, wore a sun bonnet, and took no nonsense from anyone,” Banks says fondly. “She was awesome!

“My grandfather was third or fourth among a brood of 10 or 12 of her kids.”

In those days in a place like Whitesburg, there were few doctors or hospitals, and only an informal way of adding children to the local census. Thus, there was no real rush in naming a child.

“As I recall,” Banks says, “my grandfather was two or three years old before his mother finally named him. She just called him ‘Baby,’ until the next baby came along.

“The story my great grandmother told me was that she had a dream one night. Like almost everyone else in that part of Appalachia, she was very much into ‘folklore,’ and in her dream a bird came to her and whispered in her ear, ‘If you name your child “Lucky,” he always will be.’”

The good fortune implicit in her grandfather’s given name followed her own father’s fortunes, which, she says, proved pivotal in her own life.

“My grandparents wound up having just one child,” Banks says, “and later in my own father’s life, being an only child of two hard-working individuals gave him an edge.”

Lucky sent his son to college, a rare occurrence in a place like Whitesburg. Estill Banks graduate from Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Afterwards, he met and married Kathy’s mother, Peggy, who was a graduate of a two-year nursing school. Despite their education, the pull of home was too great and Estill and his bride settled in Whitesburg.

“The pull of that place is strong,” Kathy Banks says today.

Lucky had to quit school after the third grade to work and support his family. He was a true entrepreneur at an early age with a never-quit mentality. He began selling fruit roadside, then sold coal mined by hand. He eventually grew that enterprise into a small but successful mining business of its own. Kathy’s grandmother, whose schooling ended after the sixth grade, also possessed an entrepreneurial spirt and owned and operated a small general store.

Those entrepreneurial genes were passed down to Kathy. She loved spending time with her grandparents at the mouth of that hollow, or “holler” as she still calls it.

For the definition of “holler,” one needs go no further in an online search than the Whitesburg weekly newspaper, The Mountain Eagle.

According to Eagle staffer Jim Cornett, a “hollow” is a depression between two mountains, not really big enough to be called a “valley.” A “holler,” on the other hand, symbolizes a way of life.

“A holler has a head and a mouth,” Cornett writes. “The head is as far as you can go, and the mouth is where the creek runs into a larger stream of water. A holler (has) houses spaced out on both sides of the road. You can ‘holler’ from one house to the other to share the latest news.

“A holler may have a small grocery store at its mouth,”–like the one Kathy’s grandparents owned–“and if you see someone walking to the store, give them some money and your list and they will bring your groceries back with them.”

“The further up the holler you lived, the poorer you were,” says Banks today. “I began working at my grandmother’s store when I was about six years old, stocking shelves, running the register, and when I was old enough to understand the basics of accounting, I also kept the books.

“When the poorest of our customers didn’t have enough money to pay their bills, my grandmother would give me a discreet nod indicating for me not to write down their bread-and-milk purchases in the credit ledger we kept.”

Generosity and compassion of that kind were the norm in the holler which helped shape Kathy Banks’ later life.

“It was that sense of community that I experienced growing up,” she says, “I’ve never lost my passion for helping those who have not had the advantages of others.”

As for her own formal schooling growing up in Whitesburg, Banks admits it was substandard and adhered to the cultural norms of the region.

“I took a chemistry class where the teacher never taught us chemistry,” she says of her high school years .“My physics class was primarily comprised of boys. Girls were expected to take home economics, but I was determined to know and understand physics. From a young age, I’ve been stubborn and persistent,” Banks reveals. “I don’t quit.”

After high school, Banks says she “floated” for a time, not really knowing what she wanted to do. She enrolled at nearby Berea College, but realized that staying close to home as her grandparents and parents had done wasn’t going to lead to the life she wanted for herself.

“I had a friend in Gainseville, Florida, so on a whim I decided to move there. I didn’t tell many people that I was going because I knew most people would try to talk me out of leaving home.”

Once she reached and settled into her new surroundings–Gainesville is home of the University of Florida–Banks went to work at a drug store stocking shelves. New friends advised her she could take classes at the college, if she wanted, without enrolling full time.

“I didn’t have any type of academic background that would get me into that school now,” says Banks, who was named to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014. “The University of Florida accepted almost everyone when I started taking classes there because it was a land-grant school.

“Thank the Lord we have schools like that, places for people like I was, where an education is accessible.”

After receiving her Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Duke University. Banks has worked at three other land-grant schools: Kansas State, Purdue, and since the beginning of 2012, Texas A&M University.

As for the path that led her to engineering, Banks says that journey began in an exercise class in Gainesville.

“A friend of mine told me she was in engineering,” Banks says. “I asked her, ‘So, what do engineers do?’ When she told me, I remember thinking, ‘That sounds cool.’ I liked physics in high school, so I decided to enroll in a second-level engineering physics class. They told me I needed the first-level engineering class before I could take the second, but I ignored that and took both classes at the same time and did well in both.

“I guess that’s when I knew I was in the right place.”

When she arrived in College Station to lead the A&M College of Engineering, Banks was struck by the number of qualified applicants being turned away from engineering each year—more than three thousand. She learned there was a historic “cap” on enrollment. Her commitment to the land grant mission motivated Banks to find a way to provide engineering education to as many qualified students as possible. She came up with a radical plan to do so, which eventually became known as the “25-by-25” initiative, establishing a target of 25,000 engineering students at Texas A&M by the year 2025.

From the outset as a dean, Banks committed to three guiding principles: transform the educational experience, increase access to engineering education, and deliver an affordable engineering education to all. Nobody thought diluting the college’s limited resources to accommodate such an influx of students was a good idea. Banks says the thinking was, “You need money to enhance infrastructure, then you can go after more students.” Sort of a “Field of Dreams” approach: “If you build it they will come.”

Her new realm didn’t have the money to build “it” at the time, but she knew where she could come up with funding. Thinking more like a businesswoman than an academic, Banks saw the formula as both simple and straightforward.

More students meant more tuition dollars. She also believed that big ideas generated more donations.

When Banks shared these thoughts with Chancellor Sharp, he was pleased. From his days as Texas State Comptroller, Sharp knew all about creative ways of finding money.

“Can you do it?” he asked.

“I think I can,” she replied.

As of 2020, A&M’s Engineering enrollment has nearly doubled under Banks leadership.  Of the more than 21,000 students pursuing engineering degrees, about one in four at the flagship, are the first in their families to attend college. Some of those students, doubters continue to say, lack adequate preparation to compete either academically today in college or later, in a professional environment.

And that’s okay with Kathy Banks. She’s been down that road herself.

In 2019, Banks received the prestigious Pinnacle Award, presented by Schlumberger for her dedication to future engineers. That passion has not only spurred a growth in engineering enrollment at A&M, but has also fueled her other notable accomplishments.

Under her watch, A&M has entrenched itself among the top-10 public engineering schools in the country. Her faculty has grown commensurately in both size and reputation. She’s added top-flight academics and created what are called “professors of practice,” faculty members who have come to A&M directly from the private sector with valuable perspectives from outside  academia.

Beyond the flagship campus, Banks led the A&M System’s successful bid in 2018 to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory, home to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. She also spearheaded a joint $200-million initiative between the System, the State of Texas, and the United States Army to create the George H.W. Bush Combat Development Complex at the System’s RELLIS Campus in Bryan. Work done there on behalf of the Army Futures Command will help modernize the nation’s military capabilities.

Under Kathy Banks’ leadership, A&M Engineering also has a new home: the Zachary Engineering Education Complex located on the north side of campus at the corner of University and Bizzell. The building contains unprecedented use of design and technology to support student learning. It also houses one of the most impressive art installations to be found on any college campus in the country.

“Some of our students have never had the opportunity to experience real art,” Banks says. “They came to engineering because it was a way to land a job.

“I feel like it’s my responsibility to ensure that those students have a quality education, and that means helping them become well-rounded people. They’re not well-rounded people if they don’t have a chance to experience all parts of the university environment.

“And they won’t be good engineers if they don’t understand the creative process. Artists go through the same creative steps as engineers do.”

The Zachry building’s collection features technology-base installations by artists from around the world. Each piece reflects “the interdisciplinary fields of engineering” according to the Zachary Complex website.

One of Banks’ favorite pieces sits outside the Zachry building on opposite ends of an adjacent lawn. It’s called “How to Build A Sphere Out of Cubes,” and was created by Danish-born German sculptor Olafur Eiasson. The work includes both a “human-sized” cube of brushed stainless steel, and a larger sphere comprised of dozens of the cubes. 

Banks sees a little of herself and great deal of her mission as an educator in that work.

“The individual cube symbolizes each of the new students who arrive on our campus,” she says. “Our job as educators is to help them coalesce into becoming a part of something larger than themselves.”

There’s another way to look at the piece which reflects Banks’ commitment to first-generation students whose families have entrusted Texas A&M to guide their sons and daughters to productive lives.

“I have to work on my disdain for those who like to isolate themselves because they feel superior to others due to perceived intellect or past experiences not available to most,” Banks says. “I have no patience for that.

“I think people here would tell you that my interest in mentoring students as they move through our engineering curricula, is to first and foremost make sure that everyone feels welcome. My desire to ensure that we have programs that will support those who may not have had the “advantages” enjoyed by others, come from the sense of community that I experienced growing up in Kentucky.

“I want everyone who studies engineering at Texas A&M to feel welcome, no matter where they come from, no matter if they lived at the “head of the holler,” or grew up with the country club set. It doesn't matter.

“Everyone deserves to have the same level of respect, the same opportunity, the same empathy. If you give people that, they will be successful on their own.”

A “daughter of the Cumberland,” Kathy Banks has come a long, long way thanks in large part to a heritage she holds dear.

 

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