Education: Texas Athletic & Military

Were it not a highly useful poor boys’ school, costing less than $800 a year for room, board and tuition, Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College (8,057 men) might best be known as the only campus in the world to combine the mythology of St.-Cyr, Heidelberg and the Alamo. Often called Texas Athletic and Military, it hatches ferocious football players and in both World Wars had more Army officers than West Point.* It is the nation’s largest military college and the only land-grant college that still bars women. To some it seems to be dying; to others it seems to be thriving. Even in Texas, it is so improbable that no one can predict its future.

100 Miles to Anywhere. Texas A. & M. is the hub of a 24,801-acre statewide “college system” with ten parts, including Prairie View (Negro) A. & M., the new Gulf Coast Maritime Academy, and the entire Texas Forest Service, which Texas A. & M. administers. A. & M.’s campus computer facilities are among the best in the U.S. It has the biggest activation-analysis lab in the world. It recently developed a new tomato plant tough enough to be machine-harvested, yet obedient enough to grow always to the same height. Among its faculty eminences are top experts on everything from radiation and offshore oil to cholesterol and the boll weevil.

Yet none of these superlatives catch even a whiff of the Aggieland spirit. When A. & M. opened 86 years ago, it was smack in the population center of Texas. Today it is 100 miles from anywhere—Austin, Houston or Waco—and though the site is called College Station, the trains that go through the 5,200-acre campus will stop only for hogs or horses, not humans. People who fly or drive there can see why critics call it “Sing Sing on the Brazos.” Looming out of rlatland where the lowly “post oak” grows, the school is a cluster of penal-looking buildings flying the flag of Texas. Center of the campus is the Academic Building, with an odd dome topped by a bare electric light bulb that Aggies used to shoot out regularly.

A. & M. has no departments of art, classics, music or philosophy. English, history and psychology are undistinguished. To scoffers at the major-league University of Texas, Aggies are strictly “onion packers.”

Deer in the Shower. Every Aggie joins the uniformed Corps of Cadets for at least two years. Senior cadets (“leather-legs”) may wear breeches, boots and spurs, and mercilessly haze the freshmen (“fish”), who at all times “whip out” (shake hands) and cry: “Howdy! Fish So-and-so is my name, sir!” He-manship is undying. Hearty lads skin deer in the showers, carry Volkswagens up four flights of dormitory stairs, and work round-the-clock piling timber 100 ft. high for the purgative bonfire before the Wagnerian game with the University of Texas (U.T. has won 44 times since 1894, against 17 for A. & M.). Moreover, every single Aggie stands throughout every single football game—ignoring even passing tornadoes—to signify his eagerness to take to the field if necessary as the team’s “twelfth man.”

Unhappily, all this is less appealing to prospective students than it used to be. A. & M.’s boot-camp atmosphere is generally credited with giving it a slower enrollment growth (up only 1,142 in a decade) than almost every other Texas campus. Equally dampening is the school’s no-girl policy, which now repels football players as well as students. But the masculine cult remains inviolate. This month a committee of 100 leading Texans issued a report on how the school can improve as it rounds out its first century. Carefully pigeonholed were all proposals to admit women and de-emphasize ROTC.

Proud Loolc-Alikes. The future thus looks as male and military as ever—which suits Aggieland’s alumni, many of whom are so fiercely loyal that they go back to the campus to marry and to christen their children. Among alumni are the presidents of Texaco and Gulf Oil, plus such military men as Air Force Missileman Bernard A. Schriever (’31) and Air Force General Alvin R. Luedecke (’32), now general manager of the AEC.

Last week a fresh batch of some 1,950 fish landed at College Station. Some wore boots and Levi’s, and hailed from towns like Wink, Sundown and Cottonwood. Others sported the ducktails and sidewalk gait of Houston and San Antonio. Within hours, they were all proud lookalikes, their heads shaven and their tongues sirring the seniors. Ahead lay a curious career in which the prime requirement may not be scholarship, but the prime blessing is belonging.

* In 1918 the entire senior class volunteered in a body. Twenty thousand Aggies served in World War II, 14,000 of them officers, including 29 generals. Six won Congressional Medals of Honor—and 696 died.