The author as a college freshman, Spring 1990.
So, in Texas we have two major state university systems, and two primary campuses that are the flagships of each. I speak of The University of Texas at Austin, where most of my High School friends went, and Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where I earned my Bachelor of Arts degree in the early 1990s. UT-Austin is regarded as more culturally "liberal", in a general sense, while Texas A&M University, a former land grant military college & "Ag" school, is seen today as the more culturally conservative institution. I went to Texas A&M as a matter of course, because as a Cold War kid, I enthusiastically participated in NJROTC at W.P. Clements High School, and since I wasn't smart enough or well connected enough to get into one of the Service Academies (USMA, USNA, USAFA, et.al.), Texas A&M seemed like the next best thing...I did briefly consider The Citadel in Charleston, SC but Aggieland won me over. I liked the idea of a full-time ROTC, but also liked the fact that TAMU was no longer an exclusively male, exclusively military institution the way The Citadel still was in those years. There was the chance to mix with civilian students, and I thought that to be a fine compromise.
TAMU graduates from the 1960s, 1970s & 1980s may chortle for my saying so, but in the early 1990s the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets was still a really mentally and physically challenging ordeal to go through and thrive in and survive. I don't regret doing it, I think those 3 semesters taught me a lot of self-discipline and self-reliance. I also planned out my class schedule very carefully, taking 12 hours of light, liberal artsy survey courses my first semester. I earned a 3.5 GPA and provisionally won an NROTC scholarship, which I would later lose on physical disqualification grounds due to my exceedingly bad eyesight in those pre-Lasik years.
I entered my freshman year at TAMU as what I would still call a "Moderate Republican" (already a largely vanishing species), though I had my doubts already. In High School, as I mentioned in an earlier Diary, I had read an Associated Press History of the Vietnam War, and I found this rather objective narrative of the war, complete with color photography, to be pretty horrifying, especially American policy leading up to the American involvement in that conflict. But I had compartmentalized this doubt as a "one off", something we'd moved beyond, surely.
When Gulf War I rolled around, circa 1991, I was still in the Corps of Cadets, still an NROTC scholarship holder. There was wild speculation that we'd be given early commissions and sent into battle, with the idea of continuing our educations after the war. I was highly ambivalent about that conflict. I wasn't knee-jerk anti-war, but I wasn't blindly pro-war, rah, rah, either. Then my physical exam results came back from the Navy and I was no longer eligible for commission through the NROTC program, with or without a scholarship. I was quite bitter about this at the time and gave myself the mental permission to start to question EVERYTHING I believed about American politics, foreign and domestic up to that point. Becoming a Navy officer had been my everything. When I lost that avenue forward, I lost my entire raison'd'etre of being a member of the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. I felt like the '91 Seniors were mis-managing my unit badly and I was already quite disillusioned as a sophomore cadet. I felt like the Freshmen were being let off easy, not getting it nearly as rough as we had the year before. I formally resigned from the Corps as a protest against my unit's upperclassmen and decided to go enjoy civilian life at Texas A&M for awhile.
To this day, I can't say for sure why I didn't just do the logical thing and transfer completely to UT-Austin, where most of my closest High School friends were still attending and whom I loved to visit on weekends as often as possible (which wasn't actually that often, but was always great). Once I became a civilian student, I began to deepen friendships I'd already begun to make on the outside, like with members of the TAMU German Club, and later the TAMU Russian Club.
Also, the Soviet Union collapsed and along with it East Germany (so much for using my German language skills to spy on that former Warsaw Pact nation!), which reunified with former West Germany to become one country again. Just like that, all my Cold War rationales for choosing a military career vanished. All I knew is I wanted to visit Germany more than ever, and go over to the mysterious East where travel there had been highly restricted under the old regime. Now that I was a free civilian student, I had the flexibility to consider Study Abroad, and my parents were very supportive, and so I was able to spend all of Academic Year 1992-93 in Tübingen, Germany as an exchange student (which meant some poor German had to spend a whole year in College Station, Texas in my place--I think I got the better end of that deal!).
Watching the 1992 Election unfold from outside was very eye opening. Being in Germany and mingling with Germans who openly called themselves Communist or Socialist and actually meant it was very transformative for me as well. I proudly went to the US Consulate in Stuttgart to pick up my absentee ballot for the election. Naive college student that I was, I was a little taken aback by the gruff, unfriendly consulate staff. They grimly got me my ballot, etc, in fairly short order then sent me packing back to Tübingen. I dealt only with the security official, who himself was under the watchful eye of a U.S. Marine in Dress Blues.
When Bill Clinton won nearly all of us ex-pat students were quite joyful, as were all of our German friends. There were only a few sourpuss Republicans crying in their beers that night.
Fast forward to the end of the term in 1993, I fly back to IAH Houston, my parents pick me up and turn on the radio and hear Rush Limbaugh and others spewing hate for the Clintons 24/7...and my visceral reaction on the ride home from the airport was "Turn this car around and put me on the next plane back to Germany!"
I did have fun my last year on campus finishing up my double major; for fun I bought an "Aggie Democrats" t-shirt and bumper sticker. I loved the stares and head shakes of disbelief. Not long after I had left the Corps of Cadets, I found out that a fellow cadet in one of the Army Units, who I had befriended from one of my classes, was also a fellow Democrat. He was still in the Corps and urged me to reconsider getting back in and that maybe the Army would be more lenient with respect to my horrible eyesight. I did respect this guy a lot and I gave it some serious thought in summer school, even picked up the paperwork from the Army ROTC office, but after a long night of soul searching, I decided that no, that was not the right path. Had I done so, my year abroad in Germany would never have come to pass.
I remember this cadet and I were chatting it up at the Aggie Democrats booth and one old timer alumnus of Texas A&M came up to us and said he was glad to see us Democrats still on campus, reminding us that Texas A&M had, a long time ago, been dominated by students supportive of the Democratic Party. Though of course, his Texas Democratic Party and ours were different creatures. The terrible Jim Crow legacy of "Separate But Equal" is still brought to mind by the mere existence of Prairie View A&M University, several miles down Highway 6 nearer to Houston. But that said, a lot of what the old timer was saying held true. Back in the earlier times, UT-Austin was regarded as an enclave of wealthy elites. The Rice Institute in Houston even more so. The A&M College of Texas was for the farmers, the everyman. Its traditions, its cheers, its antagonistic attitude towards UT-Austin were very much based in real class resentments against wealthy elites, very real economic grievances against those elites, etc. That real history is largely forgotten and the polarities have been in reversal ever since 1964. Texas A&M today is dominated by a student body that is largely Republican in mindset and with rising tuition and rising admission standards, I can't say I could even get in there today if I were just now graduating High School. The old genuine class resentments against actual economic elites have been replaced by the bullsh*t Fox News narratives about "Liberal Elites", where UT-Austin students are unwashed hippies, never mind that there are plenty of conservative Republicans who also attend there, too.
I guess I stayed at Texas A&M all 5 years of my college undergraduate life because of the friendships I'd formed outside of the Corps. Also, as I liked to say back then, if you come out of Texas A&M a Liberal, you come out a convinced Liberal, because you've had to swim upstream in defiance of the dominant culture around you. An Aggie Liberal is a rare & wonderful thing. Of course, when I later attended Rice University my first time through in Graduate school, many (wrongly) assumed that because I was an Aggie, I must also ipso facto be a retrograde conservative @sshole. I had to work hard to disprove this common thesis during my years at William Marsh Rice University. I started Rice University as a fairly moderate, milquetoast Democrat. I then got to experience getting called a "Stalinist" by Libertarian cranks at Rice so many times that it transformed me into the unapologetic, flaming lefty Democratic Socialist I am today and have the Bernie Sanders t-shirt to prove it.
I voted for Bill Clinton twice and was proud to do so. I voted for Al Gore and thought he completely dominated Bush in the first debate (the nation evidently disagreed). I also was a Deaniac for a time. The "Dean Scream" non-troversy still baffles me. I voted for Kerry-Edwards and my car got egged more than once for having a Kerry-Edwards sticker on it. I voted for Mr. Obama in the Texas primary the first time around (but will admit I voted Green in '08 in the General Election). I voted proudly for his re-election to a 2nd term. Hilary Clinton is far from my ideal candidate, but she will have my vote in any match up with any Republican contender, no doubt.