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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None Udder But Rudder
Into this volatile and deteriorating situation stepped the right man at the right time, although no one either intended or foresaw what would happen. In 1959 James Earl Rudder became president of Texas A&M. He was Old Aggie to the core—class of ‘32, an industrial education major, an ex-football coach, a general, and a World War II hero. Years later, a number of Rudder’s contemporaries would try to take credit for persuading him to open A&M’s doors to women and end mandatory Corps membership once and for all, but the reality is that it did not take a great amount of insight to see what had to be done. What it took was courage and clout—the willingness and the stature to stand up to the Old Aggies—and Earl Rudder had plenty of both. During World War II he had scaled a cliff on D-day, leading a team of Rangers that captured a key German position above Omaha Beach. In 1954 Governor Allan Shivers had called Rudder away from his Brady ranch to take over the scandal-ridden General Land Office, and he had restored the integrity of the agency. When Rudder ran for reelection, he wanted a slogan that people could remember. Current A&M regent John Lindsey was his Harris County campaign manager, and all he could think of was “None udder but Rudder.” The general hated it, but it became the successful campaign’s unofficial mantra.
Rudder had no academic background before he came to A&M as vice president in 1958, but he could see that the school was in serious trouble. The campus was in turmoil over the issues of coeducation and compulsory military training. The student senate had called for the resignation of the editor of the Battalion after the student newspaper came out in favor of admitting women. Academics were in sad shape, the library was terrible (“seriously inadequate” was the verdict of professional librarians from other colleges who had evaluated it in 1949), and the faculty and the administration were full of deadwood. It wasn’t long after Rudder became president that he began telling friends, “What A&M needs is a lot of funerals.”
Earl Rudder had to become a New Aggie to save Texas A&M from fading into oblivion, but it was not a role that came naturally to him. When it came to facial hair, student protests, and highfalutin ideas, he was Old Aggie all the way. A&M had no art history course and Rudder didn’t see the need for one. To him, art meant only one thing—pictures of naked women. Rudder got so exasperated with Wayne Stark, the longtime and much-loved director of the student center, for trying to interest Aggies in art that he would grumble to friends that he ought to fire Stark, which of course was as unthinkable as the regents firing Rudder. Stark had established a tradition called Cultural Weekend, in which he would take students he regarded as the cream of the crop to Houston, where they would stay at the Shamrock, four to a room, and go to the art museum and the Alley Theatre. Rudder, who hated the whole idea, made Stark change the name of the outing to Leadership Weekend.
Rudder knew that it would be easier to admit women than to end compulsory Corps membership. There was considerable precedent for coeducation. The daughter of a professor attended classes in 1893. That same decade, President Ross wanted the Legislature to establish a girls’ industrial school at A&M, but the proposal died in the Legislature. Limited coeducation for families of faculty and students’ wives was allowed into the mid-teens (and then ended), in the early twenties (and then ended), and in the thirties (and then ended). After World War II, though, coeducation became a much more emotionally charged issue, the litmus test of whether A&M would have to give in to a changing world.
Rudder had two strategically placed allies who favored the admission of women. One was the chairman of the board of regents, Sterling Evans; the other, the formidable state senator from Brazos County, Bill Moore. In 1953 Moore had passed a nonbinding resolution in favor of coeducation at A&M through the Senate while no one was paying much attention. When one senator asked Moore what the resolution said, Moore, who was in the process of earning the nickname the Bull of the Brazos, growled, “Read it yourself. You never vote with me anyway.” The resolution passed, but when Moore’s colleagues found out what he had done, they rescinded the vote two days later by a vote of 28-1. Never one to be graceful in defeat, Moore barked that A&M would be coeducational within ten years. He was right on the money. Moore held up the appointment of regents who opposed coeducation, and saw to it that Governor John Connally got the word that future appointees would not be approved unless they were willing to let women attend A&M. Suddenly the A&M board found itself with a 5-4 majority for admitting women. On April 27, 1963, in what was reported to be a unanimous decision, the regents reinstituted the old policy of letting the wives and daughters of people at A&M attend school as well as women who wanted programs available only at Texas A&M. Two years later Rudder was allowed to admit women at his discretion.
In 1965 the board voted to end compulsory membership in the corps of cadets. Rudder blamed a decision by the Department of Defense to cut back on college ROTC programs, but that was just a rationale for what had to be done. Although the Old Aggies didn’t like it, they couldn’t take on Rudder. Only he could have changed A&M from an all-male, all-military school. But Rudder had too much Old Aggie in him to be an ongoing reformer. A&M was slow to install restroom facilities for women and didn’t build a woman’s dormitory until 1972, two years after Rudder’s presidency ended with his death. Even so, he remains the school’s greatest president, the one who set A&M free. (“If it hadn’t been for Earl Rudder,” says state agriculture commissioner Rick Perry, a yell leader during the Rudder era, “Texas A&M would be The Citadel of Texas today.”) Rudder is one of two A&M presidents honored by a statue on campus. The other is Lawrence Sullivan Ross, whose work in shaping Texas A&M Rudder dismantled.
The Logic Demon
It isn’t hard to improve a university. All that’s really needed is the money, the will, and a compatible institutional culture. In the space of a few years, Texas A&M went from none of the above to all three. The subsequent history of A&M has been the steady ascendancy of New Aggies over Old Aggies.
In the seventies A&M suddenly found itself in a fortuitous position. With the Corps no longer at the center of life, A&M students could put education first. With the admission of women, the talent pool available to the school doubled. Oil royalties from university lands were flowing in. A&M was practically a brand-new university, except that it had the benefit (and sometimes the downside) of a hundred years of tradition and a fanatically loyal alumni.
A&M’s timing was perfect. The nation’s elite universities had gone through their growth spurts in the sixties, when A&M was stagnating. Graduate schools were producing many more Ph.D.’s in the seventies than they had in the sixties—but the top universities had already stocked their faculties in the previous decades. A&M (and the University of Texas) had jobs available, oil revenue that could supplement state funding, and the luxury of recruiting in the buyer’s market. (“We turned down people from Stanford!” a longtime A&M administrator told me.) The academic reputation that both schools enjoy today is largely as a result of the faculty recruiting that was done fifteen and twenty years ago.
To get a closer look at how A&M had made use of its opportunities, I decided to visit the college of liberal arts, the area that has been A&M’s biggest educational shortcoming over the years. Liberal arts received a big boost in 1986, when the New Aggies on the faculty senate adopted, over objections from Old Aggies, core requirements that required all students, even those in agriculture and engineering, to take a number of courses in liberal arts. Another nineteenth-century decision had been reversed; A&M’s mission would incorporate classical education for all students after all. Today liberal arts is the third largest of A&M’s ten colleges, trailing only engineering and agriculture in the number of students who major in one of its subjects. A film touting liberal arts has just been added to the student center’s collection of Aggieana. (“A broad-based education gives us the edge we need to be leaders in the twenty-first century.”)
The department that intrigued me the most was philosophy, because the concept of an Aggie philosopher seemed to be something of an oxymoron. A&M’s emphasis on leadership, service, and other practical skills that make up “the other education” are not exactly conducive to a life of cogito ergo suming. But philosophy at A&M turns out to be very practical indeed, a case study in New Aggieness.
“Did you know that philosophy majors do the best on the law school entrance exam?” asked Robin Smith, who came to A&M from Kansas State to head the philosophy and humanities department three years ago. He spoke with a serious air that was enhanced by a gray beard that ran from sideburn to sideburn and encroached onto his cheeks. “At the undergraduate level, most philosophy departments in the country are dominated by students who want to go to law school. We want to learn how to examine arguments. We have to learn to listen to the arguments of others. You can’t reject their opinions unless you understand why they think they are right.”
I asked Smith about what I had heard repeatedly from administrators and faculty at A&M, starting with President Bowen: One reason A&M has come so far so fast is that the university is constantly reevaluating itself. This year, the university is going through a formal planning process in which every department and every college is being asked to propose ideas for self-improvement. All universities do this, of course; the question is, Does all the planning mean anything?
My Library
