Did You Hear the One About The New Aggies?
They put education ahead of football, admitted more women than men, and learned the difference between good traditions and bad ones—and turned Texas A&M into the state’s top-rated public university. No kidding.
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So I returned to Texas A&M this year with a different viewpoint, and I saw it through different eyes. The campus is still far from handsome, but it has an unmistakable energy. A&M’s explosive growth—from 10,000 students to 43,000 in the past thirty years—has been accompanied by a building boom, mostly of undistinguished high rises that appear to have been wedged into any available vacant space, sometimes at odd angles. Students walk faster than they used to, having more distance to cover (the busy railroad line that used to be the school’s western boundary is now in the middle of the campus), and they don’t say howdy when they pass each other either, as they did in the old days. Instead of “whipping out”—offering handshakes to visitors—they just smile. Only a handful of students are in uniform; the corps of cadets is down to 2,200 members. The remainder dress casually, jeans and T-shirts on a cool day, shorts and T-shirts on a warm one, the main contrast to their peers at UT being that more shirttails are likely to be tucked in at A&M. At first glance the scene might pass for an Old Aggie’s worst nightmare. Everything has changed.
And yet, what is remarkable about Texas A&M is how much has remained the same. The sense of place is exuberant. The shuttle buses (white with maroon trim) that run through campus identify their routes not by numbers or letters but by Aggie terms: Old Army, Gig ‘Em, Hullabaloo, Bonfire, and so on. The streets are named after Aggie icons: former governors, former school presidents, former athletic heroes. The buildings may be ugly, but Texas A&M has the world’s most beautiful campus from the ankles down. The grounds are Disney World clean, and Aggies who come across a stray piece of trash invariably pick it up and throw it away. Application forms for Aggie license plates are prominently placed at the checkout window of campus parking garages. Plaques in the Memorial Student Center tell the story of Aggies who earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. In another part of the center short multimedia presentations—a series of still photographs with voice-overs—provide an introduction to Aggieland. Ostensibly the presentations are for visitors, but the earnest freshman who is manning the information desk nearby tells me, “Students looking for a pick-me-up drop in to watch.” The one that was running at the time was called “Inspiration to Greatness.” On the screen, a professor, accompanied by swelling symphonic music, was saying, “We will reach into the future as a global university.” Another said, “A&M has become a great university in the last ten years and it will become a greater university.” More faces marched across the screen: “The tradition of greatness moves us forward… . Texas A&M means being part of something larger than ourselves… . That’s why Texas A&M is great. That’s what it takes to be an Aggie.”
Highway 6 Runs Both Ways
More than a century of struggle over what it takes to be an Aggie would pass, however, before a comfortable equilibrium was reached. Texas A&M was barely three years old when the school faced its first identity crisis. It had opened in 1876 as a land-grant college, which meant that it received funds from the sale of federal lands in exchange for teaching agriculture and mechanical arts. The idea was to educate the industrial class and leave classical studies for private colleges, which tended to serve the wealthy. But there were few textbooks and fewer trained instructors in the disciplines that A&M had been created to teach, and almost immediately it began to emphasize classical education. This was the path down which most land-grant colleges would go—but not Texas A&M. By 1878 the Texas State Grange, a politically potent farmer’s organization, was complaining about the lack of emphasis on agriculture, and the next year Governor Oran Roberts pitched in: A&M’s mission, he said, was to teach students “How to produce two ears of wheat and corn and two bales of cotton by the same labor and capital that have been heretofore producing but one.” Students interested in literature and science, he noted, “are seldom found to spend their lives between the plow handles or in the workshops.” Late that year the board of directors, as A&M regents used to be called, fired the first president—who had been recommended by Jefferson Davis after the former president of the confederacy turned down the job—and the entire faculty of nine. The new president declared, not surprisingly, that students had to major in one of the two land-grant areas of study.
Two years later Governor Roberts called for the building of “a University of the first class”—The University of Texas. A&M would remain the Agricultural and Mechanical College. UT, in the discourse of the day, was “The University,” which Aggies derisively shortened to T.U.—a designation that survives in College Station to this day. For more than forty years, A&M would fight its nemesis for a share of the income from the public lands that the state constitution had set aside for UT, of which A&M was legally a branch.
All of this may seem like ancient history, but at Texas A&M, all history is contemporary. At a school that places such a heavy emphasis on tradition, nothing about the effort to become a modern university was harder than resolving the issue that had dominated its past. Was A&M a university or a vocational school? Was it a second-class adjunct of the University of Texas or an equal? Who should be allowed to go to school there? Was military training of primary or secondary importance? Could the good features of “the other education” survive an emphasis on formal education? Every one of these battles goes back at least a hundred years.
The new agricultural curriculum was not a success. As A&M professor Henry Dethloff observed in his history of the school’s first one hundred years, the farmers’ sons who went to college did so in the hope of escaping the farm, not going back to it. During the 1880’s there was serious talk, in the Legislature and in the press, of closing A&M down and converting it into—this is too perfect—a lunatic asylum. The UT regents proposed that they take over A&M. What saved A&M was the decision to offer the presidency to Governor Lawrence Sullivan Ross. A former Texas Ranger who had killed the Comanche chief Peta Nocona in battle and “rescued” his white wife, Cynthia Ann Parker, Sul Ross made peace with UT and pried money from the Legislature, and talk of shutting down the school subsided. But his lasting importance at Texas A&M was his declaration that military training at the school should be of “transcendental importance.”
A&M had found its calling. Education, even agricultural education, was relegated to secondary status: As Dethloff put it in his history of A&M, ” ‘college spirit’ and indoctrination surpassed and even began to smother academic interests.” Cadets lived together, drilled together, went to class together, even danced together. (At campus-sponsored stag dances, “girls” were identified by a handkerchief tied around a cadet’s arm.) The Corps was an all-inclusive fraternity. Its rituals became traditions; its traditions became sacrosanct. Compulsory membership in the Corps, opposed by much of the faculty, ceased to be an issue after 1912, when the regents notified administrators, faculty, and staff that “if there is among them those who cannot conscientiously support the military feature they are advised that they will seriously hamper the institution by continued opposition.” This get-in-or-get-out attitude would become an Aggie hallmark. As the saying goes, “Highway 6 runs both ways.”
By the teens the consequences of A&M’s military bent were all too clear. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching visited the campus and reported, “It is a display of great leniency to term the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas an institution of higher education at all.” There were renewed efforts to close the school. Following fires that destroyed the mess hall and the main building, the Legislature in 1913 was reluctant to appropriate money for new construction. Only a personal guarantee by regents’ chairman Edward Cushing enabled A&M to borrow money and avoid being consolidated with UT.
The discovery of oil on UT’s public lands in 1923 brought the issue of A&M’s relationship to UT to a head. The issue of whether A&M, as a branch of the university, was entitled to a portion of the oil revenue became worth fighting for. After A&M threatened to go to court, the two boards of regents agreed on a compromise: UT would get two-thirds, the Aggies one third, a division that inspired another Aggie joke. “Why was A&M’s share just one third? The Aggies got first choice.” There is a grain of truth here. A&M, starting from zero and having an uncertain legal position and less political influence than UT, was willing to settle for a minority interest.
With its funding assured, A&M no longer faced the threat of closure. But the oil windfall was spent on bricks, not brains; new buildings popped up on campus, with no effect on the quality of education. A school of arts and sciences was formed in 1924, but it offered just two courses—one called liberal arts and one called sciences. The chemical engineering department failed to achieve accreditation in 1937. Faculty members were not required to do research and had no tenure system. As late as 1946, only 17 percent of them had Ph.D.’s. Post-war A&M, historian Dethloff says, was still a school for the training of agriculturists and engineers and little else.
No one at A&M seemed terribly troubled by this state of affairs until the fifties. That’s when A&M’s enrollment began to decline during a decade when attendance at public colleges across the state was growing by 92 percent. Twenty thousand Aggies had fought in World War II, seven thousand of them officers commissioned at the college. But with the war over, the appeal of military training to returning vets and younger students alike was diminished. To the faculty, the remedy was obvious: End compulsory membership in the Corps (the freshman attrition rate in Corps dorms hit 48 percent in the fall of 1946) and admit women. But the regents, the alumni, and the Corps were Old Aggies who resolutely opposed any change: If Aggies weren’t going to be in uniform, if they weren’t going to say howdy and whip out, then they wouldn’t be true Aggies anymore, and Texas A&M wouldn’t be Texas A&M. The school president made the Corps optional in 1954, but after four years of open hostility between military and civilian students, the board reversed the policy. Once again, the survival of Texas A&M was at stake.
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