Love and Hate at Texas A&M
Facing accusations ranging from rape to bad manners, tradition-bound Aggie corpsman can’t decide whether to welcome women or drive them off.
(Page 2 of 4)
“Guess the number of condoms for a dollar!” announces a bespectacled student named Mike, who with his girlfriend Rosa, is hawking the chances. Even though the prizes speak to student-style priorities—skydiving lessons, a two-month health club membership, dinner at two local restaurants—most Aggies skitter by. “It’s a good cause,” Mike insists to the passing crowd. “It’s AIDS! It’s in the news!”
A science professor makes his guess after taking some measurements with his hands; one good-humored man buys the chances for four starched and shorn corpsmen. But for most students, a sexually transmitted disease is not a draw. “Why should I?” challenges one potential buyer. “I don’t ever have sex.” Only a rare few respond like the Aggies of those famous jokes: “Are you going to put those in a little sack for me,” a pretty co-ed with a buoyant flip asks, eyeing the rubbers, “so I don’t have to walk around with them?”
This is Aggie sex today: confused, conflicted, and best avoided, a reflection of a school at social and sexual odds with itself. The real Aggie identity has been obscured by decades of Aggie jokes—the operative Aggie stereotype is not dumbness but an obsession with ritual and tradition. The school is, at its best, a place where the intense loyalty of students and alumni has aided the efforts of administrators and faculty to move A&M into the first rank of public universities. But the passion for the past has hindered the Aggie march toward the future.
No school is more ritualized than Texas A&M. Founded as the state’s first public college in 1871, it grew up isolated in the Brazos River bottomlands, a hundred miles removed from urban Texas in three directions—a college with a military mandate but a Texas soul. In Aggieland, legends and customs are attached to everything from the school ring to the bonfire before the annual football game against the University of Texas at Austin. It is the place where everyone was, for many years, required to say howdy and greet people by name; about which Clayton Williams cries each time he recalls his happy, happy years there. It is a fantasist’s paradise of honor codes and honorable deeds, where one of the enduring goals of the university is to pass the Aggie experience on unchanged from generation to generation. “It’s all about the old days,” explains one alumnus. “That’s what’s good about A&M.”
It was, above all, a man’s place—with a few exceptions, the daughters of professors were the only women who could attend before 1963—and even though the enrollment of 40,997 students, the nation’s seventh largest, is now 41 percent women, males still dominate in all respects. If Aggieland was once rural, physical, and anti-elitist—the most Texan of Texas schools—many of those traits live on in the social and sexual conservatism of the students. You don’t see dreadlocks or slashed jeans at A&M the way you might at t.u. (as Aggies refer to their Austin rival). Males are gentlemen when they have to be, but their hearts are in their hell-raising; the Aggie idea of a good time remains a ritual like the Flight of the Great Pumpkin, in which corps members try to pitch a pumpkin filled with feces into the band members’ dorm. Women here are expected to behave. They know better than to show up at the Texas Hall of Fame Club without a date, and while they may be as sexually active as women on other campuses, they talk about it less. A&M is a school for students who put their stock in old-fashioned values and keep it there.
The real guardians of this flame are the members of the corps of cadets. Though the school stopped requiring corps membership in 1963, and though the corps’s ranks have been thinning ever since, the organization still retains its emotional power over the school and, in return, its hold on the Texas identity. That is why the current Aggie scandal has resonated across the state with such force. To confront the sexual identity crisis at A&M is to come to terms with the last vestiges of a sexual identity and sexual fantasies that have shaped the Texas stereotype for generations. Like it or not, we have met the Aggies and they are still us.
JOHN SHERMAN, HANDSOME in the way that one would expect of a senior voted most popular, stands tall and impressive in his brass, braid, and burnished senior boots. As commandant of the corps of cadets, he moves through his world with impeccable posture, a good-natured formality, and a confident semi-swagger. His face is open and unclouded, at least until the subject of women in the corps comes up. Then he frowns and snaps his head sideways, as if he were warding off a slap to the cheek.
“I’d like some legal counsel,” he says, sitting under portraits of Aggie military heroes in the Guard Room at corps headquarters. “I want to know what exactly is discrimination.” Ever since Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, he says, he doesn’t know what to say to women. Does a man get in trouble for treating a woman differently than he would treat a man? Or for treating her the same as he would treat a man—which is what the Aggies say they do? “Do you talk about ‘Did you get laid this weekend?’” he asks, his brow knit.
Sherman’s defense of the corps is the one made by most male cadets. He admits that discrimination exists, but he divides the women’s charges into those that “did happen, didn’t happen, or have been magnified.” The corps is getting better, he says, and the problems that do exist are limited to “a few bad apples.”
“With all these males,” he says, “if you try to cram it down their throats, you will alienate a lot of people who would come on board slowly.” Stepping out into the Quad, he points to a women’s dorm and talks about the dangers of mixing male cadets with women cadets too fast: “You don’t want the Russians in such close proximity to the Americans.”
Listening to John Sherman, you can see how he reached his present position. He embodies the Aggie ideal—his loyalty to his buddies is unyielding, his faith in the corps’s ability to police itself is unquestioning, he views women as both foreign and mysterious. He is proof that the Aggie experience can pass unchanged from generation to generation.
The inscription on the statue of Lawrence Sullivan Ross, the A&M president from 1891 to 1898, sets forth the virtues that Aggies are expected to emulate. The former Indian fighter, Confederate officer, and Texas governor is remembered as a “solider, statesman, knightly gentleman.” That standard was no easy trick for the school’s first students. “Many were more familiar with the lariat, the ax, plow or perhaps the six shooter than with book and pen,” according to The Corps at Aggieland, a campus history.
Membership in the corps was compulsory, and part of the corps’s mission was to make rough, uncultivated young men into productive citizens. These guys needed the basics—in the early years, weekly baths were made a school requirement. But the corps was also a distinctly Texas institution, and when military and Texas traditions conflicted, the home team usually won. Differences between corpsmen were settled not by rank, but with a good hearty fistfight.
Within a few decades, the Aggie identity was set. The Saturday Evening Post visited Texas A&M forty years ago, and the modern reader would have no trouble recognizing the place. The photographs showed guys jawing around a campfire, guys squatting around a tractor, guys arm wrestling, guys being guys. “In spite of student strikes, hair-raising tricks, and threats to convert it into a lunatic asylum,” the Post wrote, Texas A&M “claims the most fanatic loyalty any college ever had.”
Hazing was a way of life. “Everyone’s foibles were subject to ridicule,” recalls Henry Cisneros, who was a cadet and commander of the combined bands in the sixties. He was a victim of quadding—getting stripped to his underwear and spread-eagled on the ground while cadets poured water on his genitals from an upper-story window. Such trials were a point of Aggie pride. “These were my buddies, the best friends I ever had,” Cisneros says. “The mind-set was primitive, but not in a pejorative way.” If the outside world found such antics ridiculous, Aggies like Cisneros felt that the midnight raids and forced runs taught him that failure would not be tolerated, that no excuses would be accepted—“The most profound lessons I ever learned in my life,” he says.
Females had no place in this world, and the males who attended A&M liked it that way. They were learning how to be men, and women could only be a distraction. “The social life was about as close to nonexistent as you could get,” says an alumnus who graduated in the fifties. As Aggies got cars and began dating women at other Texas campuses, another Aggie myth was born—that of the insatiably horny Ag. It was not a reputation that bothered those who bore it. “It worked for you,” explains an Aggie who graduated in the seventies. “Because Aggies are supposed to be jerkball horny guys, the only women who would talk to you were lookin’ for that.”
My Library
