While other great Southern universities—such as Ole Miss—may be neurotic about race for the rest of time, A&M’s anxieties have been more about gender and sexuality. Women weren’t 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, which it said were “inconsistent with mission and core values,” 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.)

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—and Texas A&M is one of the greatest the state has—is bound to be stranger and more capacious than its most simpleminded defenders would have it. In point of fact, rather than being “inconsistent” modern impositions, cross-dressing and drag would appear to be old and venerable Aggie traditions.

The closest thing the school has to an officially approved history, Henry C. Dethloff’s Texas A&M University: A Pictorial History, 1876–1996, has barely passed one-sixth of its length before the first men in dresses appear—a cast photo of the Illyrians, a theater troupe that staged an all-male production of Shakespeare’s 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—thank you for your service, sir—played Viola pretending to be Cesario, presaging by about eighty years Judith Butler’s theories about the performativity of gender.

Texas has never known quite how to think about its universities. In almost every generation, our schools—most often the University of Texas—have 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 “Pa” Ferguson tried to fire professors at UT, claiming they had criticized him, the Legislature impeached him and he subsequently resigned.

The Aggies are getting it worse than the Longhorns ever did, and this time there’s 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—the president and chancellor of the university system are both former Texas state senators with no real history in education.

“The mood right now is by far the worst I’ve seen, the worst in two decades,” said Professor Dale Rice, who served as the speaker of the faculty senate before the Legislature disbanded it 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 “will not have them two decades from now.”

Even if you’re not an Aggie, you have a vested interest in the fight. There is, first, a material element. The flagship campus of the state’s largest public research university has historically upheld modernity in Texas, and that load-bearing institution is being diminished.