Aggieland
texasmonthly.com: You’ve written six articles about A&M over the past decade. What is it about the school that continually piques your interest?
Paul Burka: In 1997 I went to A&M to write a story about infighting on the board of regents. At the time, my impression of the university was pretty stereotypical: A bunch of guys playing soldier and doing things that made them the butt of Aggie jokes. It didn’t take very long to realize that the real story was not the regents but the academic strength of the university. A&M was a very good university bent on becoming a great one. As I began to delve into the history of the university, I came to see what an amazing place A&M is, and how much the university had to overcome before it could set its sights on greatness.
A&M’s history, as I described it then, has been one in which New Aggies have tried to change A&M for the better and Old Aggies have resisted them at every turn. Old Aggies put tradition and spirit first. They hated the decisions in the sixties to admit women and do away with compulsory membership in the Corps of Cadets; more recently, they hate the idea of emphasizing liberal arts. New Aggies care about tradition and spirit, but they understand that change is necessary if A&M is going to reach its potential. As I did my research, I began to see A&M with insider’s eyes. I saw the phenomenal love that Aggies have for their school, far beyond anything that I have encountered at any other campus. I was impressed by A&M’s service mentality; people there, from administrators to faculty members to students, are dead serious about the mission of service that was behind the original Morrill Act that established land-grant colleges in 1862. Even as A&M has gained in academic stature, it continues to stress intangibles like character and leadership and loyalty. What other major university can say that? A&M is a unique place that long ago outlived its hick-school image. And I have barely scratched the surface of what the place is like.
In subsequent years I returned to write about the Bonfire tragedy, twice—once about the football game against t.u. just eight days after the collapse that cost twelve people their lives, and again a few months later to try to explain what had happened and why. That story was a sad narrative about a tradition that had gone wrong. Bonfire was Old Aggie (or, as they say at A&M, Old Army). The redpots—students who were in charge of building Bonfire—arrogantly refused to listen to engineering professors who warned them that the design of the stack was flawed. The University was oblivious to serious injuries that occurred every year, because Bonfire was all about spirit and delegating responsibility to students. Students were expected to pull twelve hour shifts—never mind classroom responsibilities. The stack violated height rules. Allowing freshmen to work on the stack was another change from past procedures. I can hardly bear to look at the memorial, magnificent though it is, because the accident should never have happened. It is a shame that A&M did not recognize the academic and personal risks that Bonfire required students to take, and I hope that it never comes back to campus in its previous form.
What every writer hopes to do is to penetrate the myths that surround his subject and get to the heart of what it is really like. I hope I have done that at Texas A&M. Certainly I can say that I have been given every opportunity to achieve this goal by the people I have met at Aggieland. I have seen the intensity with which Aggies love their school, and no one could be failed to be impressed by it. What I like best about A&M, as someone who majored in, and has had a lifelong love for, history, is that A&M has been able to change and still somehow retain its uniqueness. And A&M has helped me to understand that stereotypes are sometimes wrong, and often cruel, and to view them with suspicion. A&M is a first-class university and ought to be universally recognized as such.
texasmonthly.com: Did something specific spur you on to write this story at this particular time?
PB: Actually, A&M contacted us. I had written about A&M grappling with change two years ago, a story that many at Texas A&M did not like. I even got one “you’ll never work in this town again” phone call. Most of the complaints were not about the story but about the cover line, “Aggie Hell,” which was tattooed onto the shaved nape of a cadet’s neck. People at A&M thought a real cadet had allowed himself to be defaced and actually tried to identify the traitor. It was a model, of course. As for the story itself, I can only say that I find the issue of change at A&M, and the reaction to it, endlessly fascinating. Where else but A&M would alumni—“former students” at A&M, there being no such thing as an ex-Aggie—object to a goal for A&M to be one of the top public universities by 2020. Aggies fear that eliteness is incompatible with Aggieness. To get back to the genesis of this story, chief marketing officer and vice president for communications Steve Moore called editor Evan Smith to say that president Robert Gates wanted to rebrand A&M and that the new branding campaign would be launched this fall. The rebranding of A&M sounded like a Texas Monthly cover story to Evan and to me, and so I got the assignment. We decided that the best way to do the story was as a profile of Robert Gates.
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