Rudder! Who redeemed the honor of France, who repaid our debt to Lafayette again, who drove the boot toe of American democracy into the shin of one pig-faced fascist after another for four hundred miserable miles. Who received, alongside a dozen medals from his own nation, the French L\u00e9gion d\u2019Honneur and the Croix de Guerre with palm and stacked them like so much cordwood among recognitions from nations as far from Normandy as the Dominican Republic, many of them on display in College Station. Who was so decorated that the U.S. Army named a new award after him. Who came home and\u2014in the manner of so many of the best of the Greatest Generation whose war service would have been enough\u2014became a great man of peace, perhaps the best university administrator A&M ever had, and turned a backwoods trade school and military academy into a modern, prosperous, equitable, integrated, and coeducational institution. A better man\u2014a harder man\u2014could scarcely be imagined.<\/p>\n
Past the medals, on the auditorium\u2019s stage in March 2024, a new generation of Aggies were exploring different ways to be men. It was the fifth iteration of Draggieland<\/a>, an annual student-run drag pageant, and the theme was Alice in Wonderland. We in the audience were through the looking glass. Bella Donna Fables, a student with a stage name, wore a tight, shiny purple bodysuit, fishnets, and fuzzy pink leg warmers. She dipped and swayed, teasing the audience of hundreds. Jets of purple smoke fired skyward. As members of the corps of cadets passed by outside, she dropped to the stage, kneeling in time with the plaintive wails of Chappell Roan\u2019s \u201cPink Pony Club.\u201d She bent backward, flattening herself, spreading her legs wide in the air, shredding on an unplugged electric guitar as the song crescendoed. The crowd, mostly young women, cheered ecstatically.<\/p>\n During the show, the moderator\u2014a towering drag queen with a beard, a purple wig, and leather thigh-high boots\u2014noted that Fables had been doing drag for only five months. Fables, our hero, had worked on the choreography and modified her outfits by hand. In College Station, day to day, there may have been parts of herself she had to hide. In the Rudder Auditorium, she was briefly a goddess.<\/p>\n After the fun was done, representatives of the Queer Empowerment Council, an ad hoc student group that popped up after the state legislature forced A&M\u2019s LGBTQ center to close with 2023\u2019s Senate Bill 17<\/a>, got up onstage. \u201cMy pronouns are they, them, theirs,\u201d one said. Draggieland provides \u201cso much queer joy and community that this campus desperately needs.\u201d They asked for donations. \u201cF\u2014 Greg Abbott,\u201d a member of the audience called. The crowd erupted in cheers.<\/p>\n In short order, its members wouldn\u2019t have much to celebrate.<\/p>\n You know Aggies, or you may think you do. If you live in Texas, you at least know Aggie jokes<\/a>, embraced in part by the school. A good-humored lot. And conservative, patriotic, upright. Or, as Longhorn snobs might have it, uptight, slow-witted bumpkins. Either way, there would seem to be an irresolvable distance between A&M\u2019s sense of itself, its pride in tradition and belief that it is the inheritor of Rudder\u2019s example, and the colorful, powerful curves of Bella Donna Fables.<\/p>\n Many graduates seem to agree. A right-wing media outfit that has been waging a campaign against the school, Texas Scorecard, sent a brave witness to Draggieland who reported back details<\/a> as if he were surveying a NAMBLA convention. The Rudder Association, an activist group that has fought to de-woke-ify A&M, charged that the event was getting too much funding from the university. State Representative Brian Harrison<\/a>, class of \u201904 and the face of the school\u2019s implacable opposition, whose central case has been that his beloved alma mater has gotten much too homo, called for anyone who authorized the show to be fired.<\/p>\n While other great Southern universities\u2014such as Ole Miss\u2014may be neurotic about race for the rest of time, A&M\u2019s anxieties have been more about gender and sexuality<\/a>. Women weren\u2019t allowed to attend until 1963; the establishment of the first gay-student group came in 1984 after a seven-year court battle. And in February 2025 the A&M board of regents, the men and woman that Governor Greg Abbott handpicked to govern the school system, unanimously voted to ban drag shows<\/a>, which it said were \u201cinconsistent with mission and core values,\u201d at A&M colleges. The contradiction was too destabilizing to be allowed. (A month later, a federal judge temporarily blocked the ban, and the Queer Empowerment Council continued with Draggieland as planned.)<\/p>\n We live in an era that is allergic to complexity and context, and in which the tolerance and mutual respect necessary to make democracy function are harder and harder to come by. Any great institution\u2014and Texas A&M is one of the greatest the state has\u2014is bound to be stranger and more capacious than its most simpleminded defenders would have it. In point of fact, rather than being \u201cinconsistent\u201d modern impositions, cross-dressing and drag would appear to be old and venerable Aggie traditions.<\/p>\n The closest thing the school has to an officially approved history, Henry\u00a0C. Dethloff\u2019s Texas A&M University: A Pictorial History, 1876\u20131996<\/a>, has barely passed one-sixth of its length before the first men in dresses appear\u2014a cast photo of the Illyrians, a theater troupe that staged an all-male production of Shakespeare\u2019s Twelfth Night in 1911, at a time when many undergraduates still lived in tents. The play, you may remember, is a comedy whose main plot involves cross-dressing, which means a heroic corps of cadets man\u2014thank you for your service, sir\u2014played Viola pretending to be Cesario, presaging by about eighty years Judith Butler\u2019s theories about the performativity of gender.<\/p>\n Aggies continued to put innovative research into the field of immersive gender studies in the ensuing decades. Starting in 1947 freshmen cadets were \u201crequired to wear lipstick and rouge and skip to class like girls on the week before Bonfire and the big football game [with the University of Texas at Austin]\u201d by upperclassmen, according to a paper by A&M professor emeritus Jonathan Smith. When administrators tried to crack down on the practice, freshmen wrote in to The Battalion, A&M\u2019s student newspaper, arguing for their right to \u201cskip and wear makeup, and thereby earn \u2018the privilege of saying they were True Aggies.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n Homosexual overtones\u2014in my College Station? In November 2025 the regents, motivated by ongoing conflict over gender and racial difference on the school\u2019s flagship campus and the perception that A&M was being ruined by woke lefties, moved to bar the teaching of any form of \u201crace and gender ideology\u201d without prior approval. It was the latest in a string of crackdowns on the campus. Professors and administrators at the university have been persecuted for criticizing state leaders, preemptively fired for their advocacy for racial inclusion, punished for including \u201cbad\u201d books in their curricula, and castigated more generally for teaching seditious ideology, including classes on political Islamism.<\/p>\n Texas has never known quite how to think about its universities. In almost every generation, our schools\u2014most often the University of Texas\u2014have come under attack by elected officials for being foreign bodies spreading a corrupting influence. But crackdowns have usually been met with strong pushback from other elected officials. When the corrupt Governor James \u201cPa\u201d Ferguson tried to fire professors at UT<\/a>, claiming they had criticized him, the Legislature impeached him and he subsequently resigned.<\/p>\n The Aggies are getting it worse than the Longhorns ever did, and this time there\u2019s been very little backlash. The school is on its fifth president in five years and appears ungovernable to both insiders and external observers. It currently has what is in effect an occupation administration\u2014the president and chancellor of the university system are both former Texas state senators with no real history in education.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mood right now is by far the worst I\u2019ve seen, the worst in two decades,\u201d said Professor Dale Rice, who served as the speaker of the faculty senate before the Legislature disbanded it<\/a> in the 2025 session. Our state has long been able to boast of having not one but two extraordinarily successful university systems, but Rice told me that what is happening at A&M creates a risk that Texas \u201cwill not have them two decades from now.\u201d<\/p>\n Even if you\u2019re not an Aggie, you have a vested interest in the fight. There is, first, a material element. The flagship campus of the state\u2019s largest public research university has historically upheld modernity in Texas, and that load-bearing institution is being diminished.<\/p>\n The other reason you should care is that the political questions facing Texas A&M are the most important questions facing the nation as a whole. In 2026, the university will celebrate its 150th birthday and the nation will celebrate its 250th. Who counts as a true Aggie? A true Texan? A true American? What is the purpose of higher education in Texas? Can we keep the great colleges we\u2019ve inherited from Rudder, or will the heroic work of generations past be erased?<\/p>\n The current conflict is a debate over the true nature of Texas A&M, so to evaluate it we have to ask what an Aggie is. Fortunately the school has produced dozens of books and journal articles on this question, from the riveting insights in Engineering Agriculture at Texas A&M: The First Hundred Years<\/a> to comedic memoirs of student life to a walking guide of the campus and at least six cookbooks.<\/p>\n Dethloff\u2019s history of the school offers two answers. His account is an affectionate chronicle that records crises large (the 1908 student strike that dethroned a president) and small (the puppy-napping of Reveille VI, the school\u2019s collie mascot, by a UT student in 1993). The first version of the school\u2019s origin is mythological. Like Rome\u2019s, the story begins with wolves.<\/p>\n At the start of the fall semester in 1876, the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas held classes for its first six students, led by six professors, in a few buildings in a field overrun with \u201chorned toads, scorpions, rabbits, and deer,\u201d wild mustangs and Longhorns, along with wolf packs. \u201cI\u2019m killed! I\u2019m killed!\u201d a student named Martin Durkin is said to have yelled as he was \u201chit and knocked to the ground by a ball of furry fury\u201d just after dinner at the end of the first week of classes. He lived: His fellows pulled him into the main building, upon which \u201cwolves scratched and clawed on the window panes,\u201d as if eager to enroll too. If the accounts are to be believed, it was one of two wolf attacks that year.<\/p>\n The school that was to be renamed A&M had very little to recommend it for many years to come. The Galveston Daily News reported<\/a> in 1884 on rumors that the lout faculty \u201cdrank liquor and played cards.\u201d A lawmaker vowed in 1893 that he would \u201cas soon give his boy a pony, six shooter, bottle of whiskey and deck of cards and start him out to get his education as to send him to the AMC.\u201d Students periodically burned their own outhouses, perhaps because there was nothing to do on \u201ccampus\u201d except obtain permission from the administration to visit Bryan, more than an hour\u2019s walk away. Out of this nothingness, a modern university grew. This is a typical frontier narrative\u2014the heroes start with nothing and end, victoriously, with everything. There\u2019s surely a lot of truth in it.<\/p>\n The second origin story in Dethloff\u2019s book, the political version, is that Texas A&M is the product of the foresight of a set of ex-Confederate, post-Reconstruction Democrats, first among them Governor Richard Coke, \u201cthe founder of higher education in Texas.\u201d Coke spoke at the college\u2019s dedication on October 4, 1876. \u201cLet honor be your guiding star,\u201d he told the students, escaping town before the wolves descended.<\/p>\n There\u2019s truth in this narrative, too, but it\u2019s obscuring a much stranger, equally essential story. Texas A&M is a 150-year sleight of hand, a trick conducted with the best of intentions and to the great benefit of the state. Dethloff hides this illusion with one of his own in the book\u2019s first two sentences: \u201cTexans, who in the fragile days of the Republic of Texas had dedicated public lands to higher education, shared the great vision and aspirations of Senator Justin S. Morrill, who introduced the bill to establish the land-grant system of public higher education. The dream could not be shaken by bloody Civil War or by bitter Reconstruction.\u201d<\/p>\n In any official history, as the besieged humanities faculty of Texas A&M could tell you, you should first look for the ellipses, the things missing and downplayed. You would not know, from this passage, who Morrill was<\/a>\u2014a Vermont Republican abolitionist\u2014or when the bill was passed\u2014in 1862, the worst year of the Civil War, when no Texans sat in Congress. You would not know that many did not share Morrill\u2019s dream of a nation of universities. Chiefly, you would not know that Texas A&M is a product of \u201cbitter Reconstruction\u201d\u2014of the victory of the Union Army and military rule in Texas.<\/p>\n Fear of the university was a continual presence south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Many colonists worried that their few colleges, staffed with imperial professors, were turning good American boys toward Mother England. After independence, universities bred like rabbits in Massachusetts and the North. Thomas Jefferson argued, in Virginia, the keystone Southern state, for a universal public-education system totally devoid of religious instruction and for an expansive, freethinking university. (In these respects, he would have opposed recent<\/a> sessions<\/a> of the Texas Legislature.)<\/p>\n His plea mostly failed. Fellow Southerners saw education and the hard sciences as Northern things. One representative example in Texas was that of Senator Louis Trezevant Wigfall, one of the strangest men in American history. In the prewar period, Wigfall\u2019s priority was to maintain the sickly social order that allowed Southern gentlemen a decent living and leisure time through slavery. The south had no \u201ccities,\u201d no \u201cliterature,\u201d no \u201cnavy,\u201d and no industry. \u201cWe don\u2019t want them,\u201d he told an uncomprehending Irish journalist<\/a>, nor did they want any \u201cmechanical or manufacturing classes.\u201d Texans were a \u201cprimitive but civilised\u201d people who were content to keep sending their bloody cotton to market on other people\u2019s ships to other people\u2019s factories.<\/p>\n Morrill introduced his land grant bill in 1857. The South didn\u2019t want it. It was vetoed in 1859 and passed in 1862 only after the Southerners had unelected themselves from Congress. Looked at one way, Morrill\u2019s bill was an act of extraordinary, high-minded generosity. At a time when Southerners, including future A&M President Lawrence Sullivan \u201cSul\u201d Ross, were killing Northern boys on the field, the North made a provision for Southern states to start universities with the proceeds from the sale of federal land once they rejoined the nation.<\/p>\n Looked at another way, the universities were a just and holy punishment from a vengeful nation. Texas, whether it liked it or not, would be forced to progress. Morrill\u2019s bill contained guidelines for the kind of education schools should offer, all of which would come to be embodied by A&M. Land grant universities would, in effect, offer instruction and research in scientific, labor-saving agriculture so as to point away from labor-intensive slave agriculture. They would offer courses in engineering to spread an industrial economy all over the nation. They would offer military training so that graduates might serve the mighty federal government in a future time of need. And while a liberal arts education was not mandated, it was permitted.<\/p>\n A&M opened in 1876. The University of Texas followed in 1883. They had fundamentally different missions from the start. UT was supposed to be \u201ca university of the first class<\/a>,\u201d i.e., a Texas Harvard, a place to train the state\u2019s elite, its nerds, its dorks. A&M had an infinitely harder and arguably more important job: It was given the task of teaching the state\u2019s roughest-hewn men to become upstanding citizens. It was a revolutionary institution. It would go on to overturn the existing agrarian social order and to prepare Texas for the twentieth century.<\/p>\n How did it succeed? The school\u2019s leaders used tradition and hierarchy to mask what it was really doing. The former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was asked to serve<\/a> as university president, but he declined, and in time Sul Ross took over. Ross had also fought to defend the old social order. As his troops approached Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1864, they killed some fleeing Black soldiers. He warned the city\u2019s Federal commander, whose forces included freed slaves, that if he won the day, he could not guarantee the protection of both Black soldiers and their white officers.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the war, though, Ross took seriously the work of bringing about modernity. As president of A&M he advocated for the Black land grant college that would become Prairie View A&M University against the racist views of other white leaders and helped start a program there to teach Black farmers.<\/p>\n For almost a century the generally impoverished and overlooked men from rural Texas who made it to College Station were placed in a strict military hierarchy, the A&M corps of cadets. They were instilled with tradition, a sense of masculine pride, and a reason to feel they belonged. The rituals of the corps<\/a>\u2014like \u201cwhipping out,\u201d in which freshmen were required to perform greetings to upperclassmen\u2014often doubled as a form of hazing on the one hand and training to join polite society on the other.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, administrators went about the work of bringing the state into the present. One of the first engineering classes built a steam engine; science classes began experimenting with novel methods of farming and agriculture. A&M made modern ranching possible and provided the workforce that helped maintain the state\u2019s oil boom. One of three degrees offered in the year of the wolf was in language and literature. While Draggieland is strange to some, there surely has been no more incongruous a sight in the history of the college than the effort to teach farm boys Lord Byron in a field in the fall of 1876.<\/p>\n Many grads failed to see what administrators did. They came to believe that the sugar that made the medicine go down, the tradition that leavened modernity, was the medicine itself. They believed\u2014wrongly\u2014that A&M was a bulwark against change rather than the embodiment of change.<\/p>\n Tensions came to a head after World War II, when the school appeared to be in terminal decline. Young people had less desire to join the monastic life of a military organization in the era of taillights and Ed Sullivan. In 1959, the year Rudder became president, A&M had 6,914 students\u2014all members of the corps, all male, mostly Anglo. Rudder integrated the school, made it coed, and eliminated the requirement that undergrads serve in the corps. He was accused by critics of wanting to destroy the university.<\/p>\n The critics were correct: The school was destroyed, and a much better one was put in its place. Like Texas as a whole, it became something new in every generation. When Rudder died, in 1970, the student body had more than doubled. By 2024, A&M had almost 79,000 students. Today, paradoxically, Rudder is seen as the great symbol of the school\u2019s continuous tradition. The example he actually set\u2014one that Ross set too\u2014was something else. Rudder showed that Aggies don\u2019t have to be afraid of the future.<\/p>\n The debates about A&M\u2019s identity continued for decades and took physical form in College Station\u2019s academic plaza at the end of the 2010s, in front of the statue of Sul Ross. The statue, on which generations of Aggies had dropped coins before exams for good luck, was one of the most important symbols on campus. But a group of students from a new generation began advocating<\/a> for its removal or the addition of a plaque that would acknowledge Ross\u2019s role in the Confederacy.<\/p>\n A more divisive argument about A&M could not have been designed in a lab. It became much more heated in 2020 when the pandemic and the summer of George Floyd protests seemed to briefly make unthinkable things thinkable. Sully\u2019s statue was vandalized<\/a> in June\u2014decorated with a rainbow wig and red spray paint that read \u201cBLM \/ ACAB \/ Racist.\u201d (The protesters denied that they had done it.) The rallies that year elicited new forces of reaction that organized themselves into the Rudder Association, an alliance of alumni and students who say they act out of love for the school. The association\u2019s founder, a graduate of the class of 1974 named Keith Hazlewood, came to show up for old Sully<\/a> after his desecration, bringing a flag and a boom box to confront protesters. The Battalion quoted Hazlewood, who had apparently not received media training, as saying, \u201cWhen they say Lawrence Sullivan Ross is a traitor, it\u2019s like telling a Black man that his dad was a\u2014you know what.\u201d (Hazlewood, who is no longer affiliated with the Rudder Association, did not respond to an interview request. The current president of the group directed me to past statements.)<\/p>\n The Rudder Association was to become an important pressure group, one leg of the forces arrayed against the administration. It mostly consisted of older men who were feuding with college students. But perhaps because this felt even to them a bit unseemly, the association has cast itself through the years as fighting against a shadowy cultural force directing the young people. Reporters on the scene during the protests clearly identified the anti-Sully side as students, but the association\u2019s account reported that the Ross demonstrations began when \u201cprotesters [were] bussed in.\u201d Do you see how far the conspiracy goes?<\/p>\n The statue stayed, with school leaders vigorously rejecting the protesters\u2019 demands. But the culture wars were just beginning, and the Rudder Association began formulating more expansive plans to take back the university from the \u201cpoisonous theories\u201d that it had uncovered. In 2021, The Battalion published an article<\/a> that included several internal documents from the association that cast the debate over A&M in grandiose terms: \u201cThe front line of the battle to preserve America for our children and grandchildren runs through our college campuses.\u201d (The association characterized The Batt\u2019s story as \u201can assault\u201d and baselessly accused the paper of hacking its website.)<\/p>\n Fighting the forces that conservatives often call \u201ccultural Marxism,\u201d the association adopted the tactics of the enemy: It literally wanted to seize the means of production of new Aggies from the school itself. The association formulated a plan to take over Fish Camp\u2014the celebrated traditional orientation program for freshmen held in the East Texas town of Palestine. The camp was \u201cleaning toward \u2018diversity\u2019 training,\u201d Hazlewood wrote in a July 2020 newsletter, pointing to a comment the group had received on Facebook complaining of the attendance of a transgender Aggie. To replace Fish Camp \u201cmay require stealth,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n Madness had taken hold. The adults proposed starting their own student newspaper as an anti-woke counterbalance. And the association recommended using Ancestry.com to research the family trees of professors, beginning with the anthropology, sociology, and psychology departments, the last of which might have offered some useful therapeutic assistance.<\/p>\n The association has since gained some acceptance in official circles\u2014enough to attract proud Aggie son Rick Perry to speak at one of its annual gatherings\u2014but it still has just a touch of John Birch about it. \u201cThe protection of identities is paramount to the operation of The Rudder Association,\u201d it says on the page where it solicits dirt from whistleblowers on the current operations of the school. \u201cThe identities of the authors of all email and direct Association contact will be kept confidential and guarded unless otherwise directed at the author\u2019s direction.\u201d<\/p>\n Old guard alumni associations are nothing new to A&M. But the Black Lives Matter protests had succeeded in producing an organization that was unusually robust and unorthodox in its methods and pressure campaigns. It would soon have a clear mechanism to convert its anger into political clout.<\/p>\n In 2022, as the tidal surges of cultural change and revolution and reaction threatened to subsume the university, Ana Renfroe entered Fish Camp, which the Rudder Association had failed to annex. She did not detect there the baleful influence of cultural Marxism.<\/p>\n Renfroe is a native of Bryan. Her mother, a Mexican national, cleaned the Bush School of Government & Public Service, where she took out the trash of the dean, Mark Welsh, and at times also cleaned the homes of faculty members. Ana grew up in the orbit of the university but did not think she was likely to ever go there. \u201cWhen I applied to A&M, I didn\u2019t think I was particularly that smart. Even now, I don\u2019t think I\u2019m particularly that smart. I think I\u2019m just kind of average,\u201d she told me in the Memorial Student Center last spring.<\/p>\n Renfroe is uncharacteristically unperceptive on this matter. She was sixteen when she applied to A&M and seventeen when she graduated from high school a year early. She was accepted with a combination of scholarships and grants that covered her attendance. But as a first-generation student of a hardworking mother who made very little\u2014and as a natural introvert\u2014she was not set up to succeed at college, or even to accept that she deserved to be there. She struggled with impostor syndrome.<\/p>\n At Fish Camp, Renfroe got an education in the traditions and culture she\u2019d be expected to uphold in the coming years\u2014training in chants and yells; relentless, silly, earnest rituals; and indoctrination into a group identity of an intensity to rival Scientology. At first it was hard. \u201cI did not have the best time,\u201d she told me. \u201cI had to force myself to be so extroverted the whole time.\u201d Thinking more about it, though, she started smiling and conceded that it made her feel like an Aggie. \u201cI mean, I do have good memories.\u201d<\/p>\n A&M\u2019s deep and often mocked traditions are helpful to its mission in this way. The class ring, worn everywhere; Silver Taps, held after a student\u2019s death; and Muster, which commemorates deaths from the previous year and was famously held in the Philippines in 1942, as the Japanese army bore down\u2014all communicate to students that they\u2019re part of a wider community to which they truly belong. Today, Renfroe, who graduated in three years, takes off her ring only to shower and do dishes, lest it wear down. Turning it over, she showed me patterned bumps on the bottom of the ring. \u201cThose are called teasip [the colloquial pejorative for UT students] assholes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But traditions also have to change to relate to students like Renfroe, who needed places to find community outside the traditional, \u201cred-ass\u201d Aggie mainstays. She initially disliked football games<\/a>, for one. For a time she found a calling at The Battalion, one of the oldest and most venerable institutions on campus outside of the corps of cadets. In late 2022 she became a news editor, a job that would task her with covering the unraveling of the school and give her an intimate lesson in how power works in Texas.<\/p>\n At the time she assumed the role, Renfroe said, she was only dimly aware of the board of regents\u2014an elusive body she had a hard time getting student reporters to take interest in. This would change, and reporting on the regents would become The Battalion\u2019s primary beat.\u00a0<\/p>\n Though the board is charged first with maintaining the independence and integrity of the university system, in 2022 a new generation of regents were coming to see their primary job as protecting state leaders from political criticism. According to the Texas Tribune, almost all the regents appointed to the boards of all Texas schools are major donors to Abbott<\/a>, and the A&M system is no exception. The chairman, Robert Albritton, has given more than $3\u00a0million to the governor.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last spring Renfroe showed me The Batt\u2019s alumni \u201cHall of Fame.\u201d On the wall was a plaque honoring Kathleen McElroy<\/a>, class of 1981. \u201cWhen I was seventeen, I decided to attend Texas A&M over Princeton because the Aggies had a better football team,\u201d McElroy is quoted as saying. \u201cI\u2019ve never regretted the decision.\u201d McElroy\u2019s trajectory brought her from The Batt to The New York Times, where she served in a series of high positions.<\/p>\n In June 2023 the school announced that McElroy would be coming home to lead the journalism program, which administrators were hoping to reinvigorate after it was dismantled in 2004. \u201cIt was very exciting to meet her,\u201d Renfroe said, \u201cand suddenly have these high hopes about the journalism program.\u201d McElroy was not only accomplished but clearly loved the school. That she was also Black did not immediately attract controversy. Why would it?<\/p>\n Then appeared an article<\/a> by Valerie Mu\u00f1oz, a Battalion alum, in Texas Scorecard. The website was founded as an arm of Empower Texans, a now defunct right-wing pressure group mostly funded by Midland oilman Tim Dunn<\/a>, a Christian nationalist. Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s article was headlined \u201cAggies Hire NY Times \u2018Diversity\u2019 Advocate To Head Journalism Program.\u201d At the time, the political valence of \u201cdiversity\u201d efforts was shifting, but it was not yet clear by how much. The Scorecard article alleged that McElroy was a disciple of \u201cDEI,\u201d which in plain language meant that she had, over the course of her career, advocated for Black and other minority journalists and attempted to help them navigate the institutional structures that she had so successfully navigated.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was friendly fire,\u201d said Renfroe, who remembers Mu\u00f1oz as a quiet part of The Batt\u2019s staff in 2023. Mu\u00f1oz, who did not respond to a request for an interview, had written just a few pieces for the student paper. In one, she condemned the decline of \u201ctraditional masculinity,\u201d pivoting off an incident when she was asked to help a bus driver; in another, she argued that \u201ceveryone should be using AI.\u201d<\/p>\n The Rudder Association got involved in the campaign against McElroy too. Its new president wrote to the regents\u2019 spokesperson warning that there was a \u201cmisalignment between the hire and the recently expressed will of the citizens of the state of Texas.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The board pressured A&M President M.\u00a0Katherine Banks to rescind the job offer. (The Batt would later report<\/a> that the regents distrusted McElroy in part because she did not seem likely to produce the kind of \u201chigh-quality journalism with conservative values\u201d that it intended for the program to produce.) A&M repeatedly altered the job offer and then, caught in a series of contradictory statements that undermined her credibility with the faculty, Banks resigned. The university had to pay McElroy a $1\u00a0million settlement.<\/p>\n The debacle sent a message to existing and prospective faculty. DEI is a new term for an old principle, one that was not controversial at A&M until recently. Diversity programs began at A&M in the 1980s, supported by the regents. When the school was designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution in 2022, federal recognition that comes with additional funding for schools with a student population that is at least 25 percent Hispanic, interim provost Tim Scott said it was<\/a> \u201cindicative of how seriously we take our land-grant mission to serve all the citizens of this great state.\u201d The happy frontier story again\u2014onward, upward, ever better.<\/p>\n But within a year or so of Scott\u2019s statement, it became completely impermissible to talk this way. In 2023 the Legislature prohibited DEI initiatives. The programs that had helped strengthen A&M for decades were airbrushed out of the picture as though they were victims of one of Joseph Stalin\u2019s purges.<\/p>\n After the McElroy incident, Renfroe and The Batt continued to take note of other strange developments that pointed to ways in which the university was newly vulnerable to political pressure. In early 2023, Joy Alonzo, a professor at A&M\u2019s pharmacy school, gave a lecture at UT\u2019s medical school in Galveston during which she allegedly criticized<\/a> Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. Unbeknownst to Alonzo, her audience included the daughter of land commissioner Dawn Buckingham, a Republican and former member of Patrick\u2019s Senate. Daughter snitched to mother, who passed it on to Patrick. Before Alonzo finished her drive home, John Sharp, the chancellor of the A&M system, sent Patrick a text message that Alonzo had been placed on leave and would be investigated.<\/p>\n Alonzo ultimately kept her job after the suspension. But Aggies had been sent another discouraging message. Renfroe and some of the paper\u2019s staffers signed an editorial asking, \u201chow much shame will university leaders subject Aggies around the world to?\u201d As long as the administration continued \u201cto put the demands of outside political actors above the well-being of our campus community, this embarrassing and destructive downward trend will continue.\u201d<\/p>\n An irony of the regents\u2019 desire for A&M to turn out journalists with conservative values is that some of the most prominent conservative journalists the flagship campus has produced have been notably hostile to the institution. There\u2019s of course Mu\u00f1oz. And there\u2019s Michael Quinn Sullivan<\/a>, a longtime right-wing influencer and the publisher of Scorecard, the outlet in which Mu\u00f1oz had railed against McElroy.<\/p>\n Sullivan, who did not respond to an interview request as of press time, got his start in small-town newspapers. His right-wing digital outlet is not likely read by many Texans but is very closely followed by elected leaders, including the governor, who fear Republican primary challenges.<\/p>\n When he launched Scorecard, it was the University of Texas that was in Sullivan\u2019s sights, as he supported the efforts of regent Wallace Hall<\/a> to unseat UT-Austin president Bill Powers. But that was politics. Sullivan is an Aggie, and Scorecard\u2019s focus on A&M, starting with the McElroy saga, was a matter of the heart. The speed with which the outlet was able to derail McElroy\u2019s hiring proved that higher ed was a much more conciliatory climate for pressure campaigns than the Legislature, where Sullivan had made himself persona non grata<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Scorecard carved a beat out of A&M, starting with the McElroy affair. According to a Texas Tribune analysis, it published more than an article a week for two years warning of the rot in College Station. A representative one from August\u00a02024 written by Mu\u00f1oz reported breathlessly<\/a> that \u201cTexas A&M signage on campus includes a photo of students sporting temporary tattoos featuring an LGBT flag with the university\u2019s logo.\u201d This was in reference to a picture that appeared in a collage on a wall of the Memorial Student Center. Mu\u00f1oz noted at the end of the piece that Scorecard raised the urgent issue to the board of regents and received no response.<\/p>\n The other articles might have silently passed, too, but a public face to boost them emerged: state representative Harrison of Midlothian. Harrison is aligned with Scorecard and also served in the first Trump administration\u2019s Department of Health and Human Services. That part of his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 both endears him to the MAGA right and presents a problem: He worked in the agency while it developed the COVID-19 vaccine<\/a>, which is not a strong foundation for a Republican primary bid. So he has found a new campaign to bolster his MAGA bona fides.\u00a0<\/p>\n A pattern got established. Sullivan\u2019s outlet would seize on a new outrage at A&M, and Harrison, a born striver with a perfectly symmetrical face and a triangular smile, would blast the news to his followers. \u201cThe ripple effects from my actions are kind of hard to overstate,\u201d Harrison told me over the phone recently. He expressed considerable pride in the number of \u201ceducrat\u201d scalps he\u2019s collected. \u201cI mean, you\u2019re seeing universities all across the state of Texas watching what I was able to do at Texas A&M, [going] like, okay, we don\u2019t want to be next.\u201d<\/p>\n Harrison described himself to me as a \u201cFirst Amendment absolutist.\u201d In his telling, his crusade is simply a fiscal one. \u201cThere\u2019s absolutely no excuse, period, whatsoever, for tax money to ever be spent on leftist, Marxist, socialist, transgender propaganda.\u201d The poor students besieged by the gay agenda at private universities cannot, we take it, rely on his protection.\u00a0<\/p>\n Harrison succeeded in pushing the most powerful people in Texas into action. In the fall of 2023 the contents of Scorecard\u2019s reporting would become a matter of state in the governor\u2019s office. In November, according to a piece in the Texas Tribune<\/a> written by Kate McGee and Nicholas Gutteridge, a former editor in chief of The Battalion, new university President Mark Welsh went to Austin to meet Abbott. He had just assumed the presidency after Banks resigned, jumping from his post as head of the Bush School at A&M.<\/p>\n To many folks on campus, Welsh seemed to be exactly the right kind of man to rescue the school from its political difficulties. It is generally believed that Rudder held on as president for as long as he did\u2014and kept the school together under similar pressure from reactionary alumni groups\u2014because he was a war hero. Welsh was something of a hero himself. He would apologetically note that the reason he was one of the few people in four generations of his family to not attend A&M was that he had wanted to be a pilot and went to the Air Force Academy instead. He served, flying the F-16 and A-10, and earned his own chest full of medals. He later was an associate director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force.<\/p>\n Just like the Rudder Association, Welsh would hug Rudder\u2019s memory with the force of a bear. In an MTV Cribs-style video<\/a> uploaded in September 2024, he led Aggies on a tour of his office, noting the portrait of Rudder facing his desk, which he said inspired him to do good. Then he pointed out that the desk was actually Rudder\u2019s. \u201cWe found it in the storeroom in the basement,\u201d he said proudly. He eagerly added that his view, facing northeast across a large quad, was the \u201csame view General Rudder had when he was in this office.\u201d<\/p>\n Welsh also made a real effort, after Banks\u2019s disastrous departure, to be open and available to the entire Aggie community. He started with student media, inviting Renfroe, at The Battalion, up for an interview in August\u00a02023, shortly after she signed the editorial that criticized school leaders while expressing support for him as president and noting that he was \u201cuniquely qualified to lead the university through this troubled time.\u201d During the interview, Welsh showed her a cardboard cutout of John Wayne that he kept to remind him to stand for something. He wanted to demonstrate to Aggies that he believed in their best selves\u2014that A&M was a \u201cshining city on the hill,\u201d an institution that \u201cstands for pride and patriotism and faith and family and loyalty and honor and respect and integrity and courage.\u201d<\/p>\n These values, it turned out, are better appreciated in College Station than in Austin. When Welsh traveled to the Capitol to meet Abbott, he was accompanied by Albritton, then the vice chairman of the board of regents. The Rudder Association and some members of the board had already been expressing concern about him, citing his previous support for diversity initiatives during his tenure at the Bush School. But this meeting with the governor should not necessarily have given Welsh cause for alarm.<\/p>\n Abbott should not have cared about the outrage in Scorecard, which belongs to a faction of the party that has been bitterly critical of him. The governor is not at risk of losing a primary and is cloaked in immense power, which should have insulated him from pests like Scorecard and Harrison. Instead, the governor\u2019s mansion trapped all the bloodsuckers in with him.<\/p>\n When they met at the Capitol, Abbott peppered Welsh with questions about Scorecard\u2019s articles, reported the Texas Tribune. He was \u201capparently unsatisfied\u201d with Welsh\u2019s responses, according to folks privy to the meeting.\u00a0<\/p>\n The English department would call this \u201cforeshadowing.\u201d<\/p>\n The magnum opus of Scorecard\u2019s campaign against A&M is titled \u201cDen of Degeneracy.\u201d It appeared in two parts, some seven thousand words total, in February\u00a02024 with an extraordinary charge: \u201cTaxpayers are funding woke classes at Texas A&M, and woke professors there are promoting antisemitism, LGBT ideology, critical race theory, and degeneracy.\u201d A&M, Scorecard reported, even taught classes about political Islamism (which, it would seem, is an important thing to study, particularly at a school that trains a good number of future CIA officers).<\/p>\n The first part was mostly a long list of professors who had some history of studying topics the website considered problematic. Sarah Beck, Scorecard said, was a \u201cscholar,\u201d in scare quotes, who used \u201cfeminist and queer theorizing.\u201d Lu Tang had the temerity to condemn people who opposed vaccine mandates while supporting abortion restrictions. Then there was the ur-degenerate: Professor joey lopez (who doesn\u2019t capitalize his name), whom readers learned has expressed an interest in the dark arts of \u201cChicana Feminism\u201d and \u201cautomotive journalism.\u201d Scorecard quoted his bio from the university\u2019s website disapprovingly: \u201che is often described as a degenerate who is looking for other degenerates to cause \u2018otherness\u2019 with.\u201d<\/p>\n Scorecard got approximately one thing right in this lengthy treatment, and it got it right by accident. The \u201cden\u201d of the title is meant to be metaphorical. But lopez actually has one, in the basement of Bolton Hall, just to the northwest of the Sul Ross statue. He\u2019s the co-coordinator of the Creative Media Lab in the Department of Communication and Journalism, and the assembled hardware of the lab fills multiple windowless rooms. It\u2019s a little like a well-funded A\/V club.<\/p>\n The campaign against A&M works by reducing its targets to stereotypes, so as to more effectively induce strangers online to hate and fear them. It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine one of those strangers hating or fearing lopez upon meeting him. He\u2019s a goofy, big-hearted, and earnest man from San Antonio, a weight lifter who has a passion for Texas barbecue<\/a>. Some tenured faculty resent having to teach; lopez teaches extra classes and uses the additional money to purchase equipment for his students and the media lab. He\u2019s guilty of being a bleeding heart\u2014he talks passionately about how Texas state parks are places for neighbors to come together\u2014but he\u2019s the opposite of the fat-cat radical folks may imagine when they think of an academic, and he\u2019s committed to a career that doesn\u2019t pay very well because he deeply loves his students.<\/p>\n An environment of collegiality and respect persisted at A&M through the years even as those qualities seemed to go into decline in wider America.<\/p>\n The implication of Scorecard\u2019s criticism of lopez was that he is an outsider\u2014a rootless cosmopolitan corrupting Texan children. But as a Texan, his credentials are unimpeachable. \u201cI\u2019m an eighth-generation Texan,\u201d he told me by the dim light of his office cave. He added that there were two Tejano signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence\u2014Jos\u00e9 Francisco Ruiz<\/a> and Jos\u00e9 Antonio Navarro<\/a>\u2014and that he\u2019s a relative of both of them. Lopez\u2019s wife works at Navarro Elementary in Bryan, where his son attended. His father\u2019s family tree also boasts the inclusion of Jovita Idar<\/a>, a legendary Laredo journalist who helped document lynchings perpetrated by the Texas Rangers.<\/p>\n I asked lopez what he meant when he referred to himself as a degenerate. He approached this point differently over the course of several conversations, eventually playing for me Dwight Yoakam\u2019s 1988 hit \u201cStreets of Bakersfield<\/a>,\u201d recorded with Buck Owens and Flaco Jim\u00e9nez. An all-around good song, he noted. He explained its larger relevance: Yoakam was a young hillbilly from Kentucky, Owens a grizzled child of sharecroppers who cut his teeth in California farm country, and Jim\u00e9nez a norte\u00f1o accordion player from San Antonio. Three underdogs from three different cultures\u2014three degenerates. \u201cThis is, like, to me, what being an Aggie, or from Texas, is all about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Every semester, lopez said, he receives, in like the tide, a wave of students who come from radically different backgrounds and contexts. As a professor of media production, lopez can\u2019t teach them how to build a bridge or operate a nuclear reactor, like some of his colleagues can. What he can try to point his students to is their \u201cshared humanity,\u201d to remind them that \u201call of us have felt less than.\u201d Being an underdog\u2014as many Aggies are\u2014can be a source of power and pride. \u201cMy job is to empower,\u201d he told me, to help students along the \u201cradical trajectory\u201d of learning to understand themselves and one another. He stressed to me over and over that his aim isn\u2019t to change his students\u2019 politics but to make their worlds bigger.<\/p>\n He now worries that everyone\u2019s world is getting smaller. The intrusion of politics and the climate of censorship have made it much harder to reach students at an individual level. \u201cWhat\u2019s going on has just made it really hard for people to even want to speak up, let alone go into those kinds of discussions.\u201d Most students still want those moments very badly, he said.<\/p>\n Indeed, the general impression I heard from professors is that their students are polite and deferential in a manner found on almost no other college campus. Dale Rice, the former speaker of the faculty senate, said he was deeply touched by the \u201camazing level of respect that students had for professors\u201d when he started teaching at A&M eighteen years ago.<\/p>\n During one class in his first year, Rice gave his journalism students frequent quizzes on current events, hoping to force them to read the news. A student complained, calling the tests useless. This hardly made an impression on Rice, a veteran newspaper reporter. \u201cI\u2019m sorry you feel that way,\u201d he recalled telling the dissident, and then he forgot about it. That night, as he was grading the tests, he realized that \u201con the back of all the other quizzes were long statements from the other students.\u201d They wrote to reassure their professor that they appreciated him and were grateful for the work he made them do, and they apologized for their classmate who failed to share the proper respect. Rice felt like he had landed on Mars.<\/p>\n This astounding environment of collegiality and respect persisted through the years even as those qualities seemed to go into decline in wider America. Some years ago, Rice\u2019s husband, a professor in the communications department, had a double lung transplant. He had serious complications and spent eight months at Houston Methodist, during which Rice drove back and forth every day that he didn\u2019t have to teach. His students got wind of this and \u201ctook up a collection and bought a gas card,\u201d Rice told me, getting a little emotional. He\u2019s sure he\u2019s had students who didn\u2019t approve of the fact that he\u2019s gay\u2014but none of them have ever said so. That\u2019s not the Aggie way.<\/p>\n The old ways aren\u2019t dead, but Rice said things have started to change. A strange countercurrent has developed\u2014a culture of snitching on professors with the goal of getting them fired, stoked by outsiders. One professor, who requested total anonymity to avoid retribution, told me about an experience in the week after the assassination of Charlie Kirk<\/a>, the right-wing influencer. When the professor entered class and saw a sea of sad young people, they set aside the lesson plan and asked students to share feelings and thoughts about what had happened. In response to students\u2019 questions, the professor tried to talk about the harm political polarization had done and the origins of political violence, and asked the class to join in a moment of silence for Kirk and his family.<\/p>\n After the class, the professor received a disturbing shock. A student had lodged an anonymous complaint with the department head accusing the professor of minimizing Kirk\u2019s death. \u201cI thought, \u2018This is it, I\u2019m fired,\u2019\u200a\u201d the professor recalled. They couldn\u2019t understand what they might have done wrong. The professor and department head each wrote lengthy apologies to the students of the class without quite knowing what the objection was. Had the professor misspoken? Had a student taped something that might be blaring on Scorecard\u2019s website soon?<\/p>\n Here, some of the old Aggie spirit came out. Conservative students in the class wrote notes to the professor with reassurance that the professor had handled the discussion with great empathy. The students appreciated that the professor had tried to speak to them as adults. They valued discussion, as Kirk had. At the end of the semester several students also left handwritten notes thanking the professor for acknowledging the assassination. At least one noted that no other professor had done so.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other teachers had presumably been too afraid to discuss the controversy in class. That was with good reason.<\/p>\n In July, Melissa McCoul was teaching a class on children\u2019s literature that included a middle-grade book titled Jude Saves the World<\/a>, in which the main character is nonbinary. Such books are banned in Texas public schools. But the ideal candidate for a university education is a person mature enough to withstand the psychological torments of what some might consider a distasteful kids\u2019 book. Not everyone in McCoul\u2019s class possessed this maturity.<\/p>\n Instead of having a conversation with her professor after class, a student began recording video<\/a> in the middle of the lecture. \u201cI\u2019m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching,\u201d she said. Hadn\u2019t President Donald Trump recently declared in an executive order that there were only two sexes? She would not stand by while others \u201cpromote something that is against our president\u2019s laws, as well as against my religious beliefs.\u201d A second student offscreen spoke up for McCoul\u2014\u201cMy gender is not illegal,\u201d they said. The filming student then seemed to start to make the case that Trump had, in fact, made the other student\u2019s gender illegal, at which point McCoul interjected and told her that \u201cif you are uncomfortable in this class, you do have a right to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n The student brought the video to Welsh. He rebuffed, in no uncertain terms, her demand that McCoul be fired. But the student was also recording him<\/a>. She soon leaked both the classroom video and the audio of Welsh to enemies of the administration, and the situation changed. Brian Harrison tweeted both out and called on Abbott to fire \u201call A&M officials involved.\u201d<\/p>\n Shortly thereafter, Welsh fired McCoul<\/a> for \u201cteach[ing] content that was inconsistent with the published course description,\u201d a rationale echoed by chairman of the board of regents Albritton. Then Welsh demoted McCoul\u2019s dean and the head of the English department.<\/p>\n The firings were not over. Abbott called Albritton and let him know that he supported Welsh\u2019s termination, according to the Tribune, though he had no statutory ability or standing to demand it. The regents, who are supposed to act independently, started looking for Welsh\u2019s replacement. Faced with being canned, he resigned. He had been in the job for just over two years. The fire hose of earnest feeling he had tried to deploy on the school had not been enough, wouldn\u2019t be enough. A&M would be moving on to its fifth president in five years.\u00a0<\/p>\n And yet, as Welsh walked out of the administration building at the center of its College Station campus for the final time last September, he was not leaving in disgrace. More than a thousand A&M students, faculty, and other admirers gathered to say goodbye<\/a>. As he left the building, John Wayne followed, folded wrong side out, like the flag of a ship in distress.<\/p>\n The throng flanked the steps of the administration building, leaving Welsh a wide corridor to travel as he was honored. A student on the stairs held a sign that read \u201cWelsh for Governor,\u201d a poke at Abbott. Another gave Welsh\u2019s wife, Betty, a bundle of roses. The crowd was a broad cross section of the school\u2019s diverse body\u2014a white student from rural Texas next to a woman in a hijab, people of all ages, all races, cheering and clapping for the entirety of Welsh\u2019s nearly nine-minute walk to his black Escalade.<\/p>\n As he approached his car, Welsh swiveled around to acknowledge the assembled students and faculty, stretching all the way back to the steps of the building. They had started singing the school\u2019s alma mater, \u201cThe Spirit of Aggieland.\u201d<\/p>\n We are the Aggies\u2014the Aggies are we Welsh began to sing too. Half a dozen more hugs later, he was finally able to open the driver\u2019s side door. After a final round of thank-you-for-your-services, he disappeared and drove away from the campus for good.<\/p>\n A History of A&M Through TM Covers Welsh\u2019s firing was a shock to the system. He was replaced by an interim leader, former state Senator Tommy Williams, who has no experience in education but does have a longtime, close relationship with Abbott. In November the A&M board of regents revised the school\u2019s policies to require professors<\/a> to obtain the administration\u2019s approval for any lesson plan that might \u201cadvocate race or gender ideology.\u201d The system also banned discussing \u201ccontroversial matter\u201d not connected with the \u201cclassroom subject.\u201d The regents reportedly would set up a phone hotline for uncomfortable students, like the one in McCoul\u2019s class, to use if they feel like trying to set a purge in motion.<\/p>\n Regent Sam Torn\u2019s explanation that the change is to \u201cmake sure we are educating and not advocating\u201d will sound like common sense to many outside the school. The problem is that there are still no clear senses of what \u201crace ideology\u201d or \u201cgender ideology\u201d mean across the many disciplines taught at A&M, despite the regents\u2019 attempt to provide definitions.\u00a0<\/p>\n The rules could not help but produce farcical results. In January a group representing some A&M faculty publicized an email<\/a> one philosophy professor had allegedly received in response to an attempt to gain approval for a proposed syllabus. The teacher could be reassigned to a different course, or they could \u201cmitigate\u201d their proposed \u201ccontent to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Professors are now incentivized to stay far clear of any subject that might cause a single conservative-leaning student discomfort. Which is, of course, the goal: A campus on which it\u2019s harder to be one kind of Texan, whose identity is subject to strict scrutiny, than it is to be another, whose beliefs are to be protected and elevated. After a decade of cultural unrest, we\u2019ve arrived at a Wokeness of the Right, with safe spaces for conservatives.<\/p>\n This, too, may eventually precipitate a backlash. But it will certainly dampen the essential spirit of A&M. After Welsh\u2019s departure and the regents\u2019 ruling, a sense of pessimism I hadn\u2019t registered before crept into my conversations with students and professors. It felt un-Aggie.<\/p>\n In October I met with Renfroe, who has taken a job as a communications officer with the architecture school. As she gave me a tour of its surprisingly attractive brutalist building, I thought on the one hand about the wolves and on the other about how much of what she showed me could be subject to a potential crackdown. Projects on display by would-be urban planners, for example, discussed the problems of disadvantaged communities on the border. Was this \u201cracial ideology\u201d?<\/p>\n Renfroe is careful about what she says, now that she works for the school, and emphasized that she was speaking in a personal capacity. \u201cWhat I can speak to,\u201d she replied when I prodded, \u201cis that Welsh was a really good president, because he cared a lot about the students.\u201d Renfroe, who plans to marry her Aggie boyfriend and stay in Bryan, still sleeps with her class ring on. But she has a friend who has stopped wearing his. \u201cI love A&M,\u201d Renfroe said. But the political turmoil \u201cdefinitely hurts a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n I met lopez in his den a month later. The regents\u2019 recent decision had changed something on campus, he said. The situation felt \u201cominous.\u201d Members of the faculty were \u201cscared to be themselves now,\u201d and though he badly wanted to stay at A&M, he couldn\u2019t deny that it had become a \u201chostile work environment.\u201d He wondered if he could talk about his ancestors in class now. Is being proud of your Tejano heritage \u201cDEI\u201d? How can you teach anything worthwhile while avoiding \u201ccontroversial subjects\u201d? He now has a lawyer look over his public statements.<\/p>\n The forces harassing the school are a tiny group, lopez told me, playing a game of their own devising. But it\u2019s \u201cat the expense of human, day-to-day relationships between thousands of people,\u201d he said. (When I read this quote to Harrison, he laughed out loud.) Somehow, too many were forgetting that \u201cdifference can have togetherness,\u201d the kind of warmhearted thing I\u2019d grown used to lopez saying. Except now he added a warning: \u201cBecause if not, we\u2019re just gonna destroy ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n It was dark by the time I finished with lopez. The campus was emptied out; the buildings were poorly lit, a little foreboding. I walked over to the Rudder Auditorium with three students and asked them about the events of the past few months. \u201cWe think it\u2019s pretty lame,\u201d said a senior from Houston who came to College Station to be an engineer but is now applying to grad schools for ethnomusicology. \u201cBut we don\u2019t really know what we can do about it.\u201d As we got closer to the Rudder shrines, the student heard drumbeats from an event in the plaza. \u201cThey\u2019re trying to summon the last Aggie spirit left,\u201d he said to his friend.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-2.jpg\")
The fall 2025 semester started with President Mark Welsh resigning under pressure, but by the close of the term in December, it was business as usual for students heading into final exams.Photograph by Meridith Kohut<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-4.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-3.jpg\")
Drag queen Bella Donna Fables was the runner-up at the Draggieland pageant in 2024.Ashely Bautista\/The Battalion<\/p>\nA protester in 2025 after the drag show was shut down.Jacquelyn Burns\/The Battalion<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-11a.jpg\")
One of the first buildings at Texas A&M University in 1877, when the campus was said to be overrun by wolves. University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, Hardin-Simmons University Library ![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-10.jpg\")
Confederate general and first A&M president Lawrence Sullivan Ross. H.R. Marks\/Collections of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society\/Virginia Museum of History & Culture <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-1a.jpg\")
Texas A&M President\u00a0James Earl Rudder kicking back in a dorm in 1969.Courtesy of The Battalion, Texas A&M University\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-5.jpg\")
A statue of Rudder.Photograph by Meridith Kohut<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-12.jpg\")
Black students at Prairie View A&M University preparing electric circuits in 1960, a few years before A&M desegregated under Rudder. Prairie View A&M University via Getty ![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-13.jpg\")
Texas A&M students constructing the Aggie bonfire in the late seventies. Bob Daemmrich\/Alamy <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-14.jpg\")
The corps of cadets marching circa 1908.University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, Hardin-Simmons University Library<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-15.jpg\")
The Battalion has kept a watchful eye on A&M since 1893 but has recently come under fire from an activist group. Photograph by Meridith Kohut ![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-16.jpg\")
Ana Renfroe, a former Battalion editor and current A&M employee, went on a date with her boyfriend to Draggieland. Photograph by Meridith Kohut <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-8.jpg\")
The Fightin\u2019 Texas Aggie Band marching to the stadium.Photograph by Meridith Kohut<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-6b.jpg\")
A&M would lose its 2025 College Football Playoff game against the University of Miami, but Kyle Field was abuzz beforehand. Photograph by Meridith Kohut ![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-7.jpg\")
Fans singing the \u201cAggie War Hymn\u201d before the game. Photograph by Meridith Kohut <\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-9.jpg\")
The Texas A&M water tower. Photograph by Meridith Kohut ![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-18.jpg\")
The Century Tree, one of the first planted on the College Station campus, where many Aggies now propose marriage. Photograph by Meridith Kohut <\/p>\n![\"Joey](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-20.jpg\")
Texas A&M Professor joey lopez, photographed in San Antonio on December 22, 2025.Photograph by Meridith Kohut<\/p>\n
True to each other as Aggies can be
We\u2019ve got to FIGHT boys
We\u2019ve got to fight!
We\u2019ve got to fight for Maroon
and White<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-19.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-covers-2a.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/am-melting-point-17a.jpg\")
Mark Welsh was forced out as president, but as he exited the administration building for the last time, he was met by a crowd of supporters.Ashely Bautista\/The Battalion<\/p>\nThe Texas A&M flag still flying despite statewide leaders\u2019 best efforts to sully it.Photograph by Meridith Kohut<\/p>\n