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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Smith pondered. “How can I put this?” he said. “A&M has its bureaucratic complexities, but there is considerable institutional support for innovative thinking and new ideas.” He gestured to a stack of examinations on his desk. “I teach introductory logic to one hundred and sixty students,” he said. “I can’t give everybody half an hour a week of individual attention. So I thought, ‘Maybe participation could be virtual.’ Two professors got a grant from the university for a Web site where students can get help and do practice problems. They wrote a special program for it. It’s called the Logic Demon.
“Right now, we’re giving ourselves a long, hard look. We have one of the three or four best master’s degree programs in the country. Do we want to expand to a Ph.D. program? There are plenty of Ph.D.’s in the field now. Maybe we should have postdoctoral fellowships or something else instead that are designed for people in executive, administrative, and political positions.
“We have to ask ourselves, What should this department be like in ten years? What will this discipline be like in the future? Are there applications for philosophy? The university is especially open to ideas that have some usefulness to other disciplines. Take consciousness. How do I know that you’re conscious? As philosophers, we spend a lot of time worrying about things that are far from everyday life. But there are a lot of people in other disciplines who are trying to understand intelligence. Are computers intelligent? Are animals? If philosophers can give them a clear picture of the issues in determining what intelligence is, we can help them with their work.”
And so I discovered that philosophy and Texas A&M are not incompatible after all. A&M is not likely to establish a broad Ph.D. program in philosophy, but there is room for niche programs that are practical. Hegel himself couldn’t have devised it better; thesis plus antithesis yields synthesis; philosophy plus practical education yields practical philosophy.
Darn Good Aggies
The Old Aggies turned out to be totally wrong. Admitting women and ending compulsory military training did not ruin Texas A&M. Students may not say howdy, but other basic values that mattered a lot more—like the sense of family—have not changed.
Brooke Leslie, who in 1994 became the first woman student body president at Texas A&M, found out about the sense of family before she ever enrolled. She is the model of a New Aggie—smart, serious, self-confident, female (this year, for the first time, the freshman class has more women than men), and every bit as loyal to Texas A&M as any Old Aggie ever was. She is from the small North Texas town of Glen Rose, and she came to A&M not for emotional reasons but because she had been recruited by Joe Townsend, the associate dean of agriculture, who had heard her speak at Future Farmers of America meetings. She had been awarded a full scholarship to study agriculture.
One day in the summer of 1990, before the start of her freshman year, Brooke received a call from Townsend. Would she come to College Station to talk with him? When she arrived, he said he wanted to help her get adjusted to A&M since she was coming from a small high school. What sort of activities might she be interested in? After she mentioned student government he said, “Brooke, you have a chance to make history. It’s going to be hard work, but you can be the first woman president of the student body at A&M.”
I first saw Brooke Leslie in one of the multimedia presentations at the student center. The theme of this one was leadership. It began with the voices of Churchill, Martin Luther King, and others, and then showed a tall, dark-haired woman student welcoming George and Barbara Bush at the groundbreaking for the Bush presidential library at A&M. “You two would have made darn good Aggies,” she said. Who is that? I asked the man from the university relations office who had brought me over to watch the films. “That’s Brooke Leslie,” he said. “She’s going to be the first woman president of the United States.”
Today she is a second-year law student at the University of Texas with 3.7 grade point average. I caught up with her at a sandwich shop near the law school after class and before her job at a downtown law firm. She was wearing a long black skirt and a red jacket with a black collar. Her hair was pulled back but not tightly, and she kept brushing stray wisps behind her left ear.
“From the very beginning,” she said, “it was drilled into us that you go to A&M to get an education, but you leave to make a difference. You learn that you’re part of something bigger than yourself, and that you’re part of a huge family, that you have to give back to the university. I know it sounds like I’m reading from the A&M recruiting brochure.”
That the tradition of “The other education” has thrived in the New Aggie era is no accident. A deliberate effort to preserve and promote it is made by administrators like Joe Townsend and by students. Columns in the Battalion emphasize tradition (TRADITIONS MORE IMPORTANT THAN INDIVIDUALS INVOLVED read one headline) and service (“Part of every student’s responsibility as an Aggie is to attempt to improve Texas A&M.”) At many state universities, fraternity and sorority members owe their primary loyalty to their social organizations, but at A&M, they wear T-shirts that say “Texas A&M Greeks—Aggies First.” Two thirds of the freshmen attend a four-day summer orientation program called Fish Camp that is held at a Methodist Church retreat in East Texas, a four-hour ride on non-air-conditioned buses from the A&M campus. Students learn the arcane yells, encounter traditions called Muster and Silver Taps that honor the Aggie dead, and meet with two counselors in groups of twelve known as DGs (discussion groups). They talk about everything from how to study to where to go on a Saturday night. Fish Camp is entirely student run, and counselors have to pay $85 to attend just as students do.
Among the traditions at A&M is Open House at the student center, a fall weekend when 15,000 students come to check out some seven hundred organizations on campus. That level of participation, says President Bowen, is “big-time unusual.” To encourage leadership, the Association of Former Students donates money to the vice president of student affairs for funding the service ideas of students. Several years ago, a group of black students got some money to hold a conference for three hundred black student leaders in the Southwest. Now an annual event, the conference draws a thousand students to A&M today. One of Brooke Leslie’s goals as student body president was to establish scholarships for service and leadership, regardless of grades. “That’s so important here, I felt it should be recognized,” she says. Now there are ten endowed service scholarships.
New Aggies have a different feeling about the school than Old Aggies do. “It’s not better or worse,” Brooke says, “It’s just different. I think it used to be based on mainly male camaraderie. For me, it’s the hometown values, it’s people who haven’t lost sight of what it means to be good friends, it’s the opportunity to develop my skills in an atmosphere conducive to community service.
“It took me a year to fall in love with the school. As a freshman, I enjoyed A&M, but I wasn’t in love with it. Then came Muster, on San Jacinto Day. I hadn’t really planned to go, but I happened to be walking past the coliseum just at the right time. I followed the other students in. The Ross Volunteers fired a 21-gun salute, and family members lit candles for Aggies who had passed on in the last year. When each name was read out, friends and family around the building called out ‘here.’ I thought to myself, ‘I am so lucky to have gone here. It’s so much more than a degree.’”
Never Been Better
An adoring history of Texas A&M published in 1951 observes, “It has been a typical growing youngster in many ways, except that in its tendency toward extremism it has been more glaringly good and bad than most. And now it has begun to mature … as we view the college today, it has achieved a substantial degree of dignity and has lost little of its driving ambition and fire.” With the advantage of hindsight, we know now that just when a new A&M seemed to be emerging, the Old Aggies would soon lead it close to ruin. That is a useful lesson for New Aggies to remember today.
Texas A&M has never been a better university. A hefty 49 percent of its students were in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating classes—higher than UT, higher than Wisconsin, higher than all but a few elite state universities. Just 33 percent of students who apply to medical schools are accepted; at Texas A&M, the figure is 44 percent. A recent study by the State University of New York at Stony Brook determined that the political science department whose faculty had the most articles accepted for publication in the three leading professional journals was Texas A&M. In defiance of the laws of probability, A&M has managed to keep everything that is essential to the Aggie tradition of “the other education” while shedding, albeit with great difficulty, almost everything that was nonessential or harmful. It has quadrupled in size without losing the feel of a much smaller school.
And yet there is always a danger at A&M, always a concern that the Old Aggies may resurrect themselves and undo what has been done. Aggies are loyal, but they are not always loyal to the same idea of what Texas A&M is. Just as Old Aggies once thought that A&M would never be the same if women were admitted, the Old Aggies of the future may think that A&M will never be the same if academics become more important than some other tradition, such as conservative political values or success in football. Highway 6 still runs both ways.
I suppose that attitude is why I have a hard time imagining myself ever going to school there. At A&M, the culture, the traditions, the sense of family, the values, are all handed to you, and you are expected to accept them. It’s a nurturing environment, but that is not the right environment for me. Come to think of it, though, Texas A&M seems like the perfect place for my son.
My Library
