What I am, and what I am not

I should probably have made this my first post, but whatever. Since I am using the moniker "Aggie Librarian", I feel the need to clarify the meaning of it. For those of you not from Texas, an "Aggie" is a current student or former student/alumni of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas (or the branch campus in Galveston, who are known as "Sea Aggies"). For the record, I attended Texas A&M University from the Fall of 1989 until August of 1994, with one year in Germany on TAMU study abroad. I graduated with a double-major BA in History and German Studies. I did at one time wear an Aggie ring, which has been subsequently lost and the way gold prices are going (up, up, up), I don't know if I'll ever be able to afford to replace it. Aggies have a reputation for being very devoted to their school, with almost cult-like fanaticism. I am not like that. I am what those kinds of Aggies would call "a 2%'er", which, as legend has it, is "that 2% of the student population which does not show/have/feel the true Aggie spirit." (the figure is undoubtedly higher than 2%, but that's Aggie mythology for you)

Aggies also have a reputation for being very conservative, folksy, belligerent, aggressive, usually working in Business or the Military or Republican political machines. I am none of THAT either (except maybe the folksy part).

DISCLAIMER: Yes, from Fall 1989 until Spring 1991 I was a proud member of the Fightin' Texas Aggie Corps of Cadets, outfit Trident P-2, of the Naval Regiment. I earned a Sul Ross Scholarship, was inducted into the Freshman Honor Society, and even earned a 3-year NROTC scholarship pending a successful medical exam. My outfit helped build some of the last of the last great Aggie Bonfires and was named Centerpole outfit my freshman year. When I graduated High School I had been in 4 years of NJROTC at Clements High School, and was quite the young fascist, Reaganite militarist, and fanatical anti-communist. I lost my Navy scholarship owing to bad eyesight, and it crushed my plans to become a US Navy officer. I entered the civilian student population. I considered transferring to UT-Austin, but by that time I already had good friends both in the Corps and among the non-regs (civilian students), and I didn't want to pull up the roots I'd already planted in Aggieland, and so I stayed.

Losing that scholarship, and with it, a promising military career, was a watershed moment, and changed my life forever, and I'm convinced for the better. It's very unlikely I would've ever gone to library school to become a librarian if I'd been commissioned as a Navy officer out of Texas A&M. I allowed myself to think heretical thoughts for the first time, and really question a lot of "givens" about our much vaunted "American Way of Life". I was highly ambivalent about Gulf War I, mostly out of ignorance, I now see in retrospect. I wasn't rah-rah pro-war, but I wasn't immediately anti-war either.

I wandered many intellectual paths since those early years, but to make a long story short, unlike the (stereo-)typical Aggie, I consider myself a Socialist, a Green, a radical democrat, with some sympathy for anarcho-syndicalism. I am a secularist, a humanist, and privately atheist. I belong to the Progressive Librarians Guild, the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) of ALA, and am very supportive of the UK-based Information for Social Change.

I worked for Texas A&M @ Galveston for 6 months, home of the Texas Maritime Academy, another Aggie connection, and yes, I am a member of the Corps of Cadets Association, which I felt as a new TAMUG employee I might ought to join. Because my own values and beliefs are at such variance with the typical TAMU graduate, I'm reluctant to call upon the so-called "Aggie Network" to look for employment, etc. Anyone who hired me primarily because I was "a fellow Aggie" would most likely be doing so for the wrong reasons, making mistaken assumptions about my personal views and politics and overall philosophy.

But the truth is, I'm just as proud, no, prouder, of my graduate studies at Rice University, a.k.a. our "Harvard of the Southwest". At one time I owned more Rice shirts and memorabilia than I did A&M stuff. I really loved my time at Rice, for all its ups and downs. Ditto for dear old Aggieland, though the dominant culture could be a bit much at times. I survived at TAMU because I connected with fellow dissenters, those 2%'ers, like me. The atmosphere at Rice U. was much freer and more open and tolerant (if a tad elitist and snobish, rubbing shoulders with some very stuck up wealthy people at times).

Aggies in Texas (much like many a super-patriotic, nationalistic American abroad) draw a lot of ire for their arrogance, their closed-mindedness, and it doesn't help that the idiot in the govenor's mansion right now was not only an Aggie, but also was in the Corps all 4 years and was a Yell Leader on top of that. I unfairly get tarred with the same brush by ignorant people who hate the Aggies (and yeah, there are good reasons why many do--I'd probably hate them too if I wasn't one) and seem to think all Aggies are just alike. It's just something I've had to learn to live with, until people truly get to know me, and come to see I'm not an arrogant asshole at all like they were expecting, that my views are actually more like theirs, more than they ever dreamed possible. Now that I'm no longer a TAMUG employee, I think I'll be wearing my Aggie gear a whole lot less these days. I feel no need to fly those colors ostentatiously anymore. I'll go back to dressing casually, and if I must wear collegiate stuff, I'll grab my Rice U. gear or even my North Texas gear (where I went to library school) first.

Also, the Aggies are the butt of many jokes from their long history as a "cow college"; The university was once known as the Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas, a land grant institution mostly dedicated to agricultural study, animal science, and the engineering aspects of farm equipment, etc, and it was moreover all male and all military until the early 1970s. Aggie Jokes are a variation on the theme of the Polish Joke...highlighting the supposed bumkin/hick nature of Texas A&M students. A lot of the angry rivalry between the University of Texas and Texas A&M was borne out of very real class resentment of working class farmers against wealthy elites who could afford to send their offspring to the University of Texas at Austin. Those early class resentments are long forgotten to most, and no longer apply to present circumstances. Texas A&M is actually not all that easy to gain admission to anymore, and tuition can be formidable indeed. There are still a few Animal Science majors and Ag majors that may know some of this history, but they are a small minority of the student population. Official histories certainly don't dwell on class resentment, but it really was very much part of that history. Another part of A&M history, and quite shameful at that, was the segregationist motives behind the founding of Prarie View A&M, an historically black college within the greater Texas A&M University System. Separate but Equal? Hardly.

Anyway, to self-identify as an Aggie can also have this jokey double-meaning, as a kind of self-depricating kind of "Aw, shucks, I'm just a dumb Aggie, what do I know?"; It is this final sense that I adopt when I call myself an Aggie Librarian, beyond the fact that I am indeed an alumnus of Texas A&M University, Class of 1993. Once an Aggie, always an Aggie, and nothing I do or say can change that history. I am what I am, despite however much I may disagree with other Aggies about any particular subject. I will always have to count on people seeing beyond the stereotype and getting to know me as a person--those willing to bother, at any rate.