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 3 of 4)
In general, Aggies worshipped their moms and planned to marry their high school sweethearts, and when they got lonely, they took advantage of the $8 Aggie Special at the Chicken Ranch down the road in La Grange. Sometimes women visited for dances or seminars—a Man Your Manners series offered by the Texas Women’s University in 1970 instructed Aggies in asking for dates and how to dress for them—but most of the time Aggies were left in glorious solitude. While they marched and competed and hazed one another, they could envision themselves as soldiers, statesmen, and knightly gentlemen. And no one was around to suggest they were anything but that.
“TALK TO ME ABOUT VAGINAS,” a woman on-screen is saying, while a man peers into her most private parts. “What does it feel like? Warm? Does it seem like a nice place to put your penis?” This is Professor Wendy Stock’s human sexual behavior class, a psychology course designed to teach students about proper sexual conduct as well as proper sexual functioning. Today’s film, for example, is supposed to get the group of ninety or so young men and women talking about the harm that comes from sex therapists who have sex with their patients. A discussion afterward covers AIDS, safe sex, the pleasure of giving women pleasure, and how to lessen male performance anxiety by—uh oh—“decreasing the macho image.”
After listening to her fellow students for almost a quarter of an hour, one student feels compelled to declare that Stock’s class has been invaluable to her.
“I’ve learned more in this class than in any other,” she says. Professor Stock, a slight woman with a halo of wispy brown curls and a somewhat pained demeanor, smiles wanly and offers thanks. “I think,” she says, “I’ve just had a mental orgasm.”
If Stock’s numerous enemies among Aggies past and present could hear such talk, it would only confirm their suspicion that women in general and Stock in particular are bent on destroying all that is great about Texas A&M. It is not just Stock’s class that has made her anathema to true-blue Ags but her role as the faculty advisor of the campus chapter of the National Organization for Women. Worse, Stock has become an unofficial spokesperson for the corps’s accusers in the press. Such activities led the Association of Former Students to call a press conference in which they charged that Stock was part of a conspiracy of feminists, homosexuals, and faculty to destroy the corps. A barrage of hate mail followed; things got so bad that Stock tried on a flak jacket after receiving a flyer that read, “Let the feminists and homosexuals meet me on the final review drill field where we can settle this issue!”
Such sentiments are nothing new. “I can verify that there is a priceless intangible spirit that most A&M men have, that I believe would be killed if girls are admitted,” wrote one alum in 1963, the year the school was opened to women. “We men know how to appreciate, love, and honor our women, but we also know what a fix Eve got us into in the Garden of Eden. Let’s not let it happen at A&M.” Aggies may be the only men left in America who will admit openly that women threaten their way of life and who will fight to preserve it.
Indeed, Aggies have been fighting women for decades. Ever since the thirties, when women first sought admission through the courts, the history of women at A&M has been a history of lawsuits. During the Depression, financially strapped residents of Bryan and College Station wondered why they had to send their daughters away to college when there was a state-supported university in town. The parents sued and lost. A judge ruled in favor of two women who brought another suit in 1958, but he was hung in effigy on campus and reversed on appeal. What finally forced A&M’s hand was not the law but economics. By the early sixties A&M’s enrollment lagged far behind that of UT and barely exceeded Lamar Tech’s in Beaumont. Still, it took the appointment of non-Aggies to the board of regents by Governor John Connally to force the school to move forward. When president Earl Rudder gave students the news in 1963, he was met by angry cadets shouting, “We don’t want to integrate.” Five hundred cadets marched on the Capitol in protest, and graduates sent back their rings and cut the Aggies out of their wills. “It’s a helpless feeling,” one student told the Houston Post. “You wake up one morning and you’re enrolled in a coed school.”
The corps held out for eleven more years. Finally, in 1974, fearing Justice Department intervention, A&M opened the corps to women, but even then corps organizations like the band and the color guard remained closed. That rule was challenged in 1979 by a student named Melanie Zentgraff, who sued the corps for sex discrimination after she was denied admission to the color guard and threatened by corps members for wearing senior boots. She leaked word of her experiences to nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, whose story was headlined CORPS PUERILITY, NOT VIRILITY, RIDES HERD AT TEXAS A&M. The suit wasn’t settled in Zentgraff’s favor until 1985; when she graduated in 1980, university president Jarvis Miller refused to shake her hand.
Even as the school capitulated to legal decrees, it continued to treat women as second-class citizens. A&M was glacially slow to build women’s dorms, rest rooms, and locker rooms; for years, the only sports offered to women were golf and bowling, because there was no place for women to change clothes. The center of resistance to women remained the corps. When women ran for the student senate, for instance, their campaign signs in the court area were burned. “It was considered good bull to protest,” one cadet told the papers. In 1986 five cadets were found guilty of assault after they dragged a woman from her post directing traffic during bonfire preparations, which was previously reserved for males, but the school seemed deaf to warnings that such incidents were not as isolated as they seemed. A faculty senate report issued in 1991 suggested outside supervision of the corps—members had been policing themselves since President Rudder removed military personnel from the dorms as a cost-cutting measure in the sixties—and revealed that 100 percent of all female cadets felt they had been subjected to sex discrimination. Again the complaints were ignored, the tacit message being that Highway 6 runs both ways.
THE NEWSPAPER HEADLINES FOR last September and October would have been agonizing for any A&M alumnus: OUTRAGES PIERCE A&M TO ITS CORPS; TEXAS A&M SHOULD CLEAN RANKS; TEXAS A&M’S TARNISHED CORPS. The stories of assault, rape, and discrimination had a no-surprise quality for many; the cadets were simply living up to their reputation. The scandal also fit the decades-long pattern in which corps resistance seems to flare up every time a sacred Aggie tradition is broken. In this case, the story unfolded just as the university was completing another step in the coeducational process. For the previous two years, the corps had been trying to disband all exclusively female units and merge them into male ones, with varying success. The Parsons Mounted Cavalry, the group accused of assault by the woman who later recanted, was, for example, one of the units most determined to remain all male.
The trouble with the scandal was that the closer one got, the less clear it appeared: Not only was the campus split over what had actually happened—the faculty sided with the protesting women; the alumni and most of the students with the cadets—but the corps itself could not reach a consensus. Some of the men (very quietly) supported Carolyn Muckley, while some female cadets deeply resented her interference. (Some of the women’s sentiments may have been in self-defense. One sympathetic male told NOW that he had witnessed “triple the anti-Wag harassment,” since the scandal broke.)
Those who disagreed with Muckley and her supporters believed that the women had exaggerated their claims, and indeed, the wildest charges were the most difficult to prove. In one investigation, the male officer accused of beating a female cadet with an ax handle was swiftly exonerated, and in another, an examination of the charges brought by the cavalry member who accused her fellow cadets with brutality turned up no such thing. The female cadet who accused a corps member of rape decided not to press charges. The situation was ambiguous (she had gone to his room willingly, and she had had a beer that night), and corps members discouraged her. The school could not do much without her assistance. Then too, some of the events cited by Muckley occurred several years ago, and since then some improvements in the status of women have been made. There has been a tendency among the women who are protesting to fail to distinguish between small charges and larger ones; any slight tended to be used as a weapon in the sex discrimination arsenal. (One woman reported to her commanding officer that a senior had called her a “bag of shit.” The CO reported back that “he treats all freshmen the same and calls both males and females ‘bags of shit’”).
My Library
