May 2004
Corps Values
Most Aggies ask nothing more of their beloved university than to remain the same. But every departure from the past—and there are many these days— is an omen for the vigilant that Texas A&M isn't what it used to be. And thank goodness for that.
I WAS LUCKY TO BE STANDING in the student section during the t.u. game. However, I was horrified when I looked across the Kyle Field to the alumni stands midway through the fourth quarter. The second and third decks on the alumni side of the stadium were only 10 percent full. While I understand that we were being outscored on the field, I had always been proud that Aggies stayed and supported their teams to the end. . . . Everyone needs to keep the spirit alive. I wouldn't be upset if it wasn't for former students complaining about the spirit of the current students.
—LETTER TO THE
IN 1964 TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY decided to open its doors to women. Thirteen female students enrolled that year, and when the school yearbook was published in the spring, their photographs appeared together on a single page, arranged in the shape of a question mark.
Forty years later, the predominant attitude toward change at A&M can still be described by that punctuation mark. Things that would pass unnoticed at other universities—those empty seats in a football stadium during a rout, for instance—take on weighty significance here. This is a campus that is organized around doing the same things in the same ways for decade after decade, and the adherence to tradition has produced a sense of loyalty and unity and a love for the institution that is the university's greatest asset. And yet, this distinctive culture has implanted in the Aggie psyche a fear of change that at times can be the university's greatest problem.
Now is one of those times. The academic year that is coming to a close has been a difficult one. A&M has had to deal with the prospect of change in three critical areas: academic stature, ethnic diversity, and tradition. Its academic reputation, as measured by the annual U.S. News and World Report ratings, has slipped badly since the glorious year of 1997, when A&M cracked the lineup of the top fifty universities for the first (and only) time and ranked higher than archrival t.u. Since then, however, A&M has fallen from forty-ninth to a six-way tie for sixty-seventh among the nation's top 126 universities. More than four hundred faculty positions have not been filled because of tight budgets, with the devastating result that A&M has the lowest percentage of small classes (fewer than twenty students) of any major university and the highest percentage of big classes (more than fifty students). In the late nineties, A&M set out on a long-term quest, called Vision 2020, to be recognized as one of the top ten public universities in America by the end of the second decade of the century. But many students and alumni have mixed feelings about the goal. They worry that in achieving academic prestige, A&M will evolve into an elitist egghead institution—that intellectual Aggies won't be real Aggies and that the things that make A&M unique, like adherence to tradition and an emphasis on developing leaders, won't matter anymore.
Diversity became an issue when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision last June allowing universities to consider race as a factor in admissions, which schools in Texas had been prohibited from doing by the now-defunct Hopwood ruling of 1996. The prospect that A&M might adopt race-based admissions dominated campus debate in the fall, with conservative-minded students sponsoring an "affirmative action bake sale" that offered lower prices for non-whites and the school's new athletics director complaining in a widely disseminated e-mail that the resulting publicity hurt the recruiting of athletes. (This charge had resonance in a year in which the Aggie football team suffered through its first losing season since 1983, including a 77-0 meltdown against Oklahoma; the conservatives responded with the statement that the athletics department should "focus on passing the ball, not the buck.") But A&M's president, Robert Gates, decided in December against establishing an affirmative action program, announcing instead that the university would step up its attempts to recruit minority students who meet the standards for admission. This laid bare the issue of whether A&M is "Crackerland," as one dismayed faculty member put it in a letter to Gates, where—despite official rhetoric and goals to the contrary—minorities are not welcome for fear that they won't buy into A&M's traditions (there's that word again) and prevailing ethos.
Of all the issues facing Texas A&M, the role of tradition is the one that generates the most passion. Nothing else comes close. Engineering is the course of study with the largest enrollment. Agriculture is the school's historic mission. But no subject is studied so intently on the College Station campus as the fabled Spirit of Aggieland and the traditions that maintain it. Spirit is a concept that most college students leave behind in high school—but not at A&M. Aggies past and present regard it as the essential element that makes their school different from any other. Consequently, the vitality of their traditions is under constant surveillance for signs of backsliding. Do students still greet visitors and each other with the requisite "Howdy"? (No.) Will the closing of the aging but much-loved Hotard residence hall next year lessen the respect for Aggie traditions? (Yes.) Has the suspension of Bonfire following the 1999 tragedy irreversibly diminished the Aggie experience? (Absolutely.) These are serious matters at A&M. They are debated among students and in the widely read Mail Call section of the student newspaper, the Battalion. Every departure from the past is an omen for the vigilant that their school isn't what it used to be, and most Aggies ask nothing more of Texas A&M than to remain the same. But it can't. Even the Corps of Cadets, which to outsiders appears to be immune to change, is going through a painful self-examination of its role and relevance at the university as its membership continues to dwindle.
What is happening here is that a 127-year-old university is trying to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. Well, not exactly. The decision has already been made for it. In a state with only two flagship institutions, each must be an academic powerhouse. Texas A&M doesn't have a choice; it can be other things, but it must be that. It must place more emphasis on graduate programs, research, and liberal arts, which is very new for a university with a track record of paying so little heed to areas of study outside its original mission that, for most of its history, academic departments were organized into just four groups: engineering, agriculture, veterinary medicine, and everything else. Not until the creation of a faculty senate, in 1983, did professors have a voice in academic decision making, albeit a small one. Not until February of this year did A&M have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the national honors organization for outstanding achievement in the liberal arts and sciences. Two hundred and sixty-four American universities had PBK chapters before A&M did.
The truth is that A&M is not as different from other universities as Aggies perceive it to be. It is different only in its culture, not in its problems. Its core issues are the same ones facing every major university: academic quality, funding, diversity, size, decaying infrastructure, striking the right balance between undergraduate and graduate education and between teaching and research, and pressure from former students over everything from firing coaches to getting their kids into school. Only one fundamental issue is peculiar to A&M, and it is ever-present: Can the forces of change overcome the forces of resistance?
IN MY 23+ YEARS on this campus, I believe that, in many ways, this was one of the most significant events in Texas A&M's history! . . . I recall hearing a visitor once describe us as "a campus seething with content," and I think yesterday's event was an important and long-overdue wake-up call.
—FACULTY E-MAIL PRAISING THE SUPPORTERS OF A PRO-DIVERSITY RALLY, FEBRUARY 2002
THAT A SENIOR FACULTY MEMBER could consider a mild-mannered demonstration a landmark event suggests just how rare such occurrences are at Texas A&M—and how hard is the lot of those who seek to bring change to the campus. A&M is often described by its critics, inside the university and out, as a politically conservative institution, but the conservatism is as much cultural as ideological. The promotion of mainstream values starts at the top, with president Gates—who said recently in an official statement, "Our culture is grounded in patriotism, religious belief (however expressed), loyalty to family and to one another, a hard work ethic, character, and integrity"—and permeates the Aggie community, right down to the student-run summer orientation program for incoming freshmen known as Fish Camp.
What is striking about these values is that they are personal rather than intellectual; most major university presidents, I suspect, would put open-mindedness and respect for ideas at the top of their list and leave patriotism and religion as matters of individual, rather than institutional, choice. This difference defines the distance that separates the University of Texas and A&M, which sometimes seems more like one hundred years than one hundred miles—and each university is perfectly happy with its choice.
To visit A&M is to see its values on public display. You're unlikely to run into male students with facial hair or female students with body piercings. You won't see a lot of frayed shorts or jeans that are worn-out at the knees. The appearance of the students is tidy and so is that of the campus, thanks to near-universal adherence to unwritten rules. Students who come across a wayward piece of trash pick it up. Students who consider taking a shortcut across a lawn resist the urge, lest they trample the grass. No Aggie would forget to take off his gimme cap upon entering the Memorial Student Center, which honors Aggies who fell in battle, and if a visitor did so, he would quickly be told to remove it. Sometimes, though, the enforcement of values by self-appointed guardians can go to absurd extremes. A male student recently wrote a letter to the Battalion relating how three members of the Corps of Cadets tried to hector him into giving up his aisle seat on a campus bus to a girl standing nearby, even though a number of middle seats were vacant.
