Gig 'em
Senior executive editor Paul Burka, who wrote this month's cover story, "Corps Values," talks about diversity at A&M, the future of the Corps of Cadets, and Aggie traditions.
Senior executive editor Paul Burka has been a frequent visitor to Aggieland in recent months. He discusses the past, the present, and the future of Texas A&M and evaluates the prospects of Vision 2020.
texasmonthly.com: In 1997 you wrote an article declaring Texas A&M the best public undergraduate university in the state. Why did you decide to look at A&M again?
Paul Burka: Since doing that story, I've written about A&M on two other occasions—one was about the 1999 Bonfire tragedy, the other about the retirement, in 2002, of President Ray Bowen—so I've kept up with what is going on at A&M generally. The moment that made me want to do another story occurred when I was doing research for an article I wrote last fall on the aspirations of the University of Texas. I noticed that, in the six years since my first Aggie story, A&M had dropped substantially in the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings of American universities—at a time when the school-announced goal, in a project called Vision 2020, was to become one of the top ten public universities in America by the year 2020. The main reason for A&M's decline (from forty-ninth to a six-way tie for sixty-seventh among 126 major universities) was average class size. A&M had the lowest percentage of small classes of any university on the list and the highest percentage of large classes. Small classes used to be one of A&M's strengths, so I wondered what was going on over there. I made a couple of phone calls and found out that quite a lot was going on. The faculty was some four hundred positions short of full strength. The campus was divided over whether to institute an affirmative action program in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that race could be a factor in college admissions.
One of my colleagues, Pam Colloff, was working on a story about a student effort to bring back Bonfire, and that seemed to epitomize the perpetual struggle at A&M between the old and the new. The university's new president, Robert Gates, has vowed to be an agent of change. One of his initiatives is to bring the faculty up to full strength. Change is always a big story at A&M because the exalted role of tradition in campus life means that there is always a huge constituency for preserving things as they are. I decided to revisit A&M in the spring, after I finished my story in the February issue on President Bush ("The Man Who Isn't There," February 2004). Once I got started on the A&M story, I realized that the changes were even more widespread than I had imagined.
texasmonthly.com: What is the most interesting thing you learned while working on this story?
PB: That's easy. It was that the impetus for change has even penetrated into the last place you would expect to find it: the Corps of Cadets, the fortress of tradition at Texas A&M. The Corps is down to an all-time low of 1,706 members, mainly because its training methods—which are patterned after the verbal and physical hazing of Marine drill instructors in movies such as Full Metal Jacket—make it incredibly difficult for first-year students to remain in good academic standing. It's totally self-defeating, and it's taken the Corps forty years after the end of compulsory military training to realize it. But the realization has set in, thanks to the retired general in charge and the cadet commander. Naturally, the rank-and-file members of the Corps have fought them every step of the way. Keeping "fish," as the freshmen are known, out of school for weeks at a time to do physical training is a tradition at A&M. But the truth is that if the Corps does not change, it will not survive.
texasmonthly.com: Were students, faculty members, and administrators willing to talk openly about the university's weaknesses?
PB: Oh, yes. One of the great things about A&M is that there isn't a false note about the place. Everybody loves the school, and everybody has an opinion about what it needs to do. From President Gates down to the students I interviewed, people were extremely open about their views. I want to clarify one thing though: I wouldn't describe what they were doing as "talking about the university's weaknesses." Most Aggies are relentlessly positive people. So if they were talking about, say, affirmative action—whichever side they were on—they tended to talk about why their position was good for A&M, rather than why the alternative view was bad.
texasmonthly.com: In your opinion, which A&M traditions should be maintained, and which need to go?
PB: Some traditions are essential to what makes A&M a unique place: Muster is the annual worldwide gathering of Aggies on San Jacinto Day to remember their friends who have died in the past year; Silver Taps is a ceremony honoring a student who has died in the previous month. These traditions establish the notion that Aggies are lifelong members of a large family. Other traditions are fading with the times, such as saying "Howdy" to everyone you meet on campus. (Several girls told me that it's a pickup line these days.) Standing throughout a football game, staying until the game is over, swaying by alternate rows to the fight song—Aggies will be doing these things a hundred years from now. But there are two traditions that got out of hand. One was Bonfire, which resulted in serious injuries and occasional deaths even before the 1999 collapse. Like the Corps, it involved too much time and too little concern for students' academic needs. It allowed a few students who were in charge, called redpots, to have complete control over a five-hundred-ton construction project. Redpots and administrators alike ignored warnings from engineering professors that the design was dangerous. Safety considerations that were standard in years past—no freshmen working on the stack, for example—were forgotten. If Bonfire ever does return to campus (and the insurance cost may be prohibitive), it should be totally changed so that the time required, the risk of serious injury, and the authority delegated to student leaders are greatly reduced. The other tradition that got out of hand and needs to go is the Corps' training methods. The Corps is too important to Texas A&M to allow a bunch of kids who get their kicks out of hazing other kids to destroy it, which is what is happening now. If the U.S. military can change to positive leadership, why can't the Corps of Cadets?
texasmonthly.com: When you were in College Station, did anyone greet you with "Howdy"?
PB: Nary a soul—and I made thirteen day trips to the campus.
texasmonthly.com: Were you able to assess the overall student sentiment about academics versus traditions at A&M?
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