Corps Values
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Inevitably, values issues flare up on campus, as when eight professors in the College of Education objected last spring on religious grounds to a proposed diversity statement drafted by a faculty committee. It called for the "celebration and promotion of all forms of human diversity, including sexual orientation and domestic partnerships." The dean of the college defended the proposal, leading to a brouhaha that was fought out in the pages of the Battalion. At the time, the dean was one of two finalists for the prestigious post of executive vice president and provost, and her supporters believe that the incident effectively ruined her chances for the promotion.
One day I attended a class called Teaching and Schooling in Modern Society, in the College of Education, which dealt with some of the issues that aspiring teachers would soon face in their own classrooms—what to do about prayer in the schools, for example, or about saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Around 160 students, almost all of them white, about three fourths female, filled the lower rows of an auditorium while two professors fired questions at them. "How many of you favor school prayer?" More than a hundred hands shot up. "Should the Pledge of Allegiance include the words 'under God'?" A girl raised her hand. "The founding fathers represented one religion," she said. "If other religions weren't represented, why should they be allowed to stop everything?" "People are looking for a way to get offended," said another girl. And another: "I respect someone else's beliefs, but I can't see why other people won't respect mine." And another: "Government is trying to make teachers a neutral shell. We cannot shed our beliefs."
One of the professors saw that he was losing the battle. "You may know what you believe," he said, "and what Scripture means and what the Constitution says, but it won't necessarily be clear to everybody in your classroom. No matter how much you feel angry about what is happening in the world, you have to put those feelings aside to teach every student in the room." The students did not seem convinced.
A&M, WHILE RENOWNED for agriculture, engineering, architecture, and business, has a less-than-stellar though slowly improving reputation for liberal arts, which leads many outstanding students to choose the University of Texas instead. If students do choose to attend A&M, they end up grumbling in frustration over the lack of liberal arts class offerings. For instance, UT boasts 650 Spanish majors compared to A&M's 111, as well as more Spanish professors and graduate students . . . Although the name of the university is now simply Texas A&M, shortening agricultural and mechanical cannot hide the fact that these are still the emphasized aspects of academics.
—OPINION ARTICLE IN THE
ABOUT THE LAST THING A VISITOR to the A&M campus expects is to open the student newspaper and read an article comparing A&M unfavorably with the University of Texas. The booklet for Vision 2020 went even further; it compared A&M not only to UT but to six other top public institutions: Berkeley, UCLA, University of California-San Diego, North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This is elite company, and it's not surprising that A&M's doctoral programs in the liberal arts received the lowest ratings by far of any university on the list. The most frequent comment that then-president Ray Bowen heard from Aggies, however, was not that A&M had to improve but that it shouldn't be trying to emulate those schools. "He caught a lot of flack for comparing us to Berkeley," a longtime A&M administrator told me. "They said, 'Why do we want to be like a school that has a bunch of hippies and protesters?'"
Whether or not A&M attains the goals of Vision 2020, the act of pursuing them will inevitably change the university. A&M was created as a land-grant college in 1876. Most Americans who have even heard of land-grant colleges remember them as a line in the history books about federal support for education. The idea back in 1862 was to educate the children of the working class in an era when college was mainly for the rich or the religious and mainly about providing a classical education in letters and sciences. Land-grant colleges were created to teach the practical arts, agricultural and mechanical, that could improve society in the industrial age. Liberal arts did not play a prominent role; they served only to round out the education of engineering and agriculture students, not as a course of study in their own right. At A&M, where the emphasis was, as the old saying went, on "cows, sows, and plows," they barely played a role at all. The pejorative term "teasip," which Aggies scathingly employ to describe t.u. students, connotes salons and sissified beverages and ivory-tower discussions. This may all seem like ancient history, but at A&M it's present tense. People still talk about the land-grant mission, though more and more it's the old-timers on the faculty and in the administration who do the talking, like Joe Townsend, an associate dean in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Townsend is a higher-education archetype, the kind of legendary figure who loves his school, seems to know every student by name, and has a long institutional memory. It was Townsend who reached onto a shelf and pulled down the Aggie yearbook from his freshman year to show me the photos of the thirteen pioneer coeds. He is a large man with an open face and an open manner, and as we sat in his office and talked about the changes sweeping over the campus, he stopped four or five times to summon students who passed by his open door. "Come here, I want you to meet somebody," he would say, and then he would introduce each one by name, major, and hometown. "Being an Aggie is about love," he said after one encounter. "Aggies love each other. Some kids want an Aggie ring more than a diploma. It's a spirit that can never be told."
After graduating in 1967, Townsend taught at Iowa State. He came back in 1984 to a different A&M than he had left, one that was more serious about academics and research. "The good-old-boy system was dissolving," he said. He pointed to the 1988 firing of Jackie Sherrill, a highly successful football coach who had gotten caught violating NCAA rules, as a turning point—an early indicator that a once-insular institution cared what the outside world thought of it. Today it cares more than ever. That is what Vision 2020 is all about: reputation. And reputation depends on graduate programs and research, not undergraduate education, A&M's traditional strength, and certainly not on what is referred to at A&M as "the other education," which is an emphasis on values and leadership. And to Townsend, that is a departure from the land-grant mission. "Students come here with values, and we reinforce them," he said. "I call it 'creed, character, conduct.' A moral compass. The best thing we do here is solidify them."
It was impossible not to notice a trace of wistfulness in his voice. As A&M focuses more and more on research—tenure, promotion, and raises for professors all hinge on getting research grants—liberal arts is just catching up with the rest of the campus. The College of Agriculture probably produces more cutting-edge research than any other area of the university, and it boasts A&M's only Nobel laureate, Norman Borlaug. That part of the land-grant mission, service to society, is going strong at A&M, but it's the other part that has Townsend worried. "We're here to educate the common man," he said.
Later I attended his Life Skills class, in which he attempts to do exactly that. Around two hundred students gathered in an auditorium to hear Townsend meld talk of Aggie traditions ("Tonight is Silver Taps [a ceremony to honor a student who has died in the past month]. It's one of the traditions I hold near and dear to my heart. You should go. You'll really understand what it means to be an Aggie") with advice for life ("Your generation is information-rich and experience-poor. We encourage internships and trips abroad. There's a horticulture fair today. Walk through it; you might find some good internships"). The class ended with an exercise in which students paired off and told each other about their goals. The objective was to learn to be an "active listener" ("Try to maintain eye contact for at least twenty-five seconds"). Perhaps there is a class at UT that tries to mold students, but I couldn't imagine it.
There was a time when most of the students at A&M were from small towns. Townsend himself was typical. He came from McAllen forty years ago, the first member of his family to go to college. In those days, he told me, "the admissions requirements were that you had to be alive and have fifty bucks." Today, the likelihood is that seven or eight out of every ten students in his Life Skills class are from the Dallas, Houston, or San Antonio metropolitan areas, and, as Townsend knows all too well, they aren't likely to walk through horticultural fairs. And that isn't the only difference between then and now. "Everybody was in the Corps then," he said. "All Aggies were equal. Today, all Aggies are not equal. If your GPA here is 2.5, you can get into only twenty of the one hundred and twenty-two majors. A lot of Aggies are getting left out."
Then he brightened. "We've still got the mystique and tradition," he said. "If you meet an Aggie, you'll know it in two minutes."
I will be an agent of change. If A&M wants to maintain the status quo, I am the wrong guy for the job.
—ROBERT GATES TO THE PRESIDENTIAL SEARCH COMMITTEE, 2002
SHORTLY AFTER GATES TOOK OVER as president of A&M in August 2002, the summer commencement ceremony was held in Reed Arena. No one suspected that it would be the portent of a revolution. But there it was: The deans were sitting in the front row, where the vice presidents had formerly congregated, and the VPs had been relocated to the second row. And the faculty! Instead of being relegated to the floor of the arena, as had been their previous lot, they were seated on a newly erected stage on the same plane as the one the students walked across. The first goal of Vision 2020, "Elevate our faculty," was a reality, in geometry if not yet in governance.
