A Decade Without Bonfire

Is being against the return of Bonfire as much an act of Aggie heresy as it was ten years ago?

It's entirely possible that socialization is as much of a core competency at Texas A&M as education.  It all starts at Fish Camp, which almost every incoming freshman attends and learns all the Aggie traditions and terminology.  It continues at the solemn remembrances of fallen Aggies at Silver Taps and Muster.  It even includes the numerous extracurricular activities, which are referred to as "The Other Education."  Traditions are so ingrained at A&M that the on-campus bus routes are named after various traditions.  One route is even called "Traditions" (is it a tradition to have traditions?).  The biggest tradition of all, and the event that symbolized better than anything the group identity of the Aggies, was Bonfire.

I didn't ever participate in Bonfire, not that I had a strong opinion about it either way when I was at A&M.  Like everyone, I thought it was just about the coolest thing ever when I was in attendance.  And during the actual cutting and building, well, it wasn't really my thing.  When I was a freshman, I attended cut class, which was the mandatory safety class that everyone who wanted to go out into the woods and cut down trees for Bonfire had to take.  It was ostensibly about safety, but the bulk of the half hour was spent reciting the (unprintable) dorm yells.  I also experienced “wake up” as a freshman.  The cars that went out to the woods for cut left at about six in the morning, so the upperclassmen would go around the hall at around five on Saturday morning and bang on every door as hard as they could, yelling all sorts of things and kicking on the door so hard you thought they were going to kick it in.  As an out of state kid, I didn't come in with a real love of Bonfire, so I didn't really participate in it.

Like everyone, I knew that Bonfire had a reputation for a lot of alcohol on the job and for hostility toward the international students who walked past the Polo Fields on their way home from class.  And yet, for at least a week after Bonfire fell, I was adamant that Bonfire was a crucial part of Texas A&M and absolutely could not be taken away.

I arrived outside the old basketball arena at about 5:00 a.m. on November 18, 1999, and heard the news that Bonfire had fallen.   I was in line to camp out for tickets to the next week's Texas game.  The mood at that point was this odd mix of gloominess and normalcy.  We all knew something was wrong, but we couldn't really go anywhere or follow the story, so poeple were chatting and playing cards.  Later, as I started going to classes and more information started flowing in, it got really, really awful.  The moment that it really hit me was when I went into the library annex to read for a class and a sign on the door said, "Be sure to call your parents and let them know you're OK."

After Bonfire fell, I heard its necessity compared to that of breathing and driving cars.  I didn’t go that far, but I certainly didn’t believe that "they" (whoever they were) had any place telling us what we could do with one of our proudest traditions.  I believed that the twelve who lost their lives were doing something they loved and that the best way to memorialize them was to keep Bonfire going.  Though I hadn't participated in its construction, I thought it was a necessary part of this university that I had come to identify with.

At some point that winter, I changed my tune.  I thought about myself as someone who had been recruited from out of state and had very little previous knowledge of A&M before arriving there.  I thought about how it would be to attract similar candidates in the future if Bonfire stayed around and those candidates knew essentially two things about A&M: 1) they have this thing that killed a bunch of people, and 2) they kept it going despite most of the country calling for it to be ended.  I thought about how silly it was that we had so much of our identity tied up in this stack of logs, and how strange it had been for me to be so supportive of it.

The one moment that really soured me on Bonfire was the next spring, when the investigation into the causes of the collapse was completed.  The findings were announced at the basketball arena, and students were allowed to attend the press conference.  The chairman announced how poorly the operation had been supervised and how little actual engineering knowledge went into the construction.  The findings were focused primarily on the physical reasons for the fall (ground conditions, the integrity of the center pole, etc.) and paid less attention to the social aspects of Bonfire.  During the presentation, a reporter asked why the commission did not address the issue of hazing at the Bonfire site.  The commissioner said that he did not feel it was necessary to discuss something that had nothing to do with the fall of Bonfire.  At that moment, a giant cheer went up from the 3000 or so students in attendance, a cheer like you would hear at a sporting event.  I don't suppose I really know what they were cheering (I guess it was the commissioner's resistance to the media's trying to frame Bonfire as a bunch of drunk kids running around unsupervised), but it really seemed to me like they all missed the point.

And I think they're still missing the point.   It appears that most Aggies, including Governor Perry, are in favor of bringing Bonfire back on campus.  This is despite the fact that it has been deemed uninsurable and another death or serious accident could mean the end of the university.  I've heard several times now that the campus is noticeably different without Bonfire---people are less friendly and the campus doesn't have the unity it once did.  That, in addition to being the most egregious case of Good Old Days Syndrome I've ever heard in my life, is complete and utter garbage.  If the people who support this idea had spent more time in logic class and less time at cut, they might have been introduced to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.  And besides, I just found out that Howdy Ags (http://howdyags.tamu.edu), whose purpose is to reverse the decline of the popular Aggie greeting (no kidding), was formed in 1997, two years before Bonfire fell.

Texas A&M University is better now than it was ten years ago.  That would have been the case had Bonfire never collapsed, too.  Just because that's what one generation of Aggies used to bond with one another doesn't mean that's the only way it can be done.  Neva Hand, the mother of one of the 12 Bonfire victims, said it best: "A&M has to be more than bonfire. It has to be bigger than the tradition itself.  If the students of A&M cannot come up with something better to form camaraderie and strive together to build and work for something really big, then they're not the students that I think A&M students are."

Forget academics, which by any objective measure are improving across the board. Students are as engaged as ever in extracurricular activities that don't involve giant burning piles of wood.  A few years ago I got to visit with some of the student leaders from the Memorial Student Center who had made a trip to Austin, and their love of Aggieland was unaffected by the lack of a 60-foot-tall symbolic fire before Thanksgiving.  My sisters had an experience at A&M that was not that different from mine.  Football games are still football games, and basketball games are, well, now they actually resemble basketball games.  (By the way, where are we on that Jerald Brown statue?)

The institutional memory of Texas A&M is such that many current students are arguing for the necessity of an on-campus Bonfire, even though they were in elementary school when it last burned.  Several successsive A&M administrations have been criticized for saying Bonfire can't return, but I think they're making the right choice.  Bonfire should never come back---the brand has been forever tarnished, it's not financially viable, and it runs counter to the direction the university needs to go.  Bringing it back would mean choosing between a safe version built with little student input or a student-led giant liability waiting to happen, and neither option is worthwhile.

The return of Bonfire is likely to remain a contentious topic, with both sides trying to honor the memory of our twelve fellow Aggies who gave their lives.  Say a prayer for those kids and their families.  So much has happened in my own life in the past ten years that it's hard to believe---I feel so sorry that their lives were cut so short.