Rainey, you are cracking me up! When you came to town and stumbled upon the art installation in downtown Bryan, a good review came from the place. To me it was a sign of the times a bit: “If it’s scary, it needs to go away.” Then…recriminations, blame, finger pointing (that happens when kids die) but instead of saying, let’s engineer something safer or figure out what went wrong, they just killed it. So then, these kids died, every Aggie felt it. You could feel the heat coming off it 2 miles away. But when you went to one, there was no denying it was awesome. Personally, that was nothing I was interested in. It was months of getting up at 4am and working like a lumberjack. I never wanted to go work on it, but a lot of kids at that school did, and a lot of them wanted to be “part of the school.” Consider that they worked on it for months it was more than just one football game thing. I’m the worst Aggie in the world, but Bonfire was the only Aggie tradition I thought was unique and historical. I asked a friend of mine who went to A&M about it, and here’s what he said: Indeed, it’s so grandiose as to seem almost tone deaf, at least to an outsider-after all, more A&M students died in each of the various wars of the 20th and maybe 21st centuries than in Bonfire, yet none of those memorials warrant several acres of hewn, engraved stone. It is as enormous and solemnly grand as something you might see on the Washington Mall or the beaches of Normandy. The memorial, like the old bonfires themselves, dwarfs anything comparable on campus. ![]() On the other end of campus, there is also an enormous, Stonehenge-like monument to the 1999 tragedy: 12 students, mostly freshmen, were killed in the middle of the night when Bonfire collapsed, and another 27 students were injured, some very seriously. These sculptures, collectively titled “The Spirit of Bonfire,” were placed in 1987, 12 years before the tragedy: The first is a three-part miniature that depicts erecting Bonfire Bonfire in flames and the tools used to construct it. There are actually two monuments to Bonfire on campus. My friend was somewhat at a loss as to which was preferable.įinally, you can’t talk about the culture of memorialization on the A&M campus without addressing the elephant in the room: the bonfire (or as Aggies call it, simply “Bonfire”). Whereas the A&M students, with their earnestness and ingrained respect for authority, were more attentive and worked harder. Recently, an artist who taught at both UT Austin and A&M told me that, while the UT students were far more urbane and sophisticated than A&M students, they were also more disinterested and seen-it-all-jaded. Although they do say slightly creepy things like “genetics:”) ![]() (I mention the mostly-Brutalist campus architecture, but there are several older, more charming buildings, with pretty tile work and animal motifs. In other words: step aside, Mother Nature. These lines from the 18th-century English poet John Dyer are engraved on the side of one building: In addition to the militarism, there is Manifest Destiny on view at every turn, which is perhaps fitting for a college with “agriculture” in the name (hence the “A”). (West Point also looks like a fort, but that’s because it actually was one before it became a school.) In fact, the A&M campus feels more fortress-like than some actual service academies like Annapolis or Air Force. While it’s true that all universities have their traditions and memorials, A&M takes this notion to a whole other level.īut if you take into account that A&M was founded as a military college, this all makes sense, right down to the strikingly ugly, drab Brutalist architecture. Almost nothing that can have been given a veneer of meaning has been left untouched. I’ve heard there’s more bronze at A&M than at any other university in the country (unverified, but could be true). ![]() The place is also covered with bronze statues, plaques, and other memorial signifiers. At A&M, you get the sense that sharing in the experience of the group is more important than striking out on one’s own as an individual. It projects intellectual safety, rather than intellectual openness. By contrast, Texas A&M is a fortress: a sturdy, solid, no-frills series of beige bunkers that convey something of a siege mentality. Think stately, gracious, ivy-covered buildings of stone or red brick. If universities project their sense of identity through their campuses, the usual image is one of gravitas, beauty, and intellectual openness ( university shares the same root as universe, after all).
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