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Texas A&M students are intensifying efforts to bring bonfire back to campus, a month after the Aggie governor said the tradition would return and weeks before the university marks the 10-year anniversary of the fatal collapse.
Bonfire has not burned on campus since November 1999, when a 59-foot stack of logs tumbled, killing 12 and injuring 27. An off-campus group burns a smaller version in an event that's not sanctioned by the university.
A bonfire open forum is scheduled for 3 p.m. Thursday in Room 144 of the Koldus Building. One or more members of the Board of Regents, the A&M System's ultimate governing authority, will be there.
A committee within student government is gauging student opinion with an informal, nonscientific survey handed out to about 300 people. Student leaders plan to go through the results shortly.
Last week, a couple dozen students filed into the student senate room, and more than a dozen made minute-long pitches for bonfire's return as Chancellor Mike McKinney, the head of the Texas A&M System, sat in attendance.
McKinney told students that they needed to come up with a concrete "business plan" that would address issues such as sexual harassment, liability and safety.
"Just put that in your plan, and you'll get the support of us," McKinney said. In an interview afterward, he clarified that didn't mean there would be blanket support of any plan.
But it's clear that top officials are receptive to talking about the issue at a time when all nine regents have been appointed by Gov. Rick Perry, a former Aggie yell leader who said last month and previously that he wanted bonfire back on campus.
After hearing from the bonfire supporters, who represented a tiny part of Texas A&M's nearly 49,000 students, at Wednesday's meeting, McKinney asked the 100 or so in the room for a show of hands of who had been to an on-campus bonfire.
About 15 hands shot up.
One of them belonged to Trent Ollre. The 21-year-old said he saw bonfire burn on campus when he was 5 years old, and it left a searing impression on him.
"It's the same feeling that happens when I go to a football game and the crowd gets loud. It's the kind of thing that gives you goose bumps," the College Station resident said.
Ollre is part of a small group. Most current students have no memory of an on-campus bonfire. Supporters are instead spurred by stories from Aggie relatives or notions of tradition.
The debate has intensified after Perry told Texas Monthly in comments printed in the November issue that bonfire would return to campus.
Officials from both Texas A&M University and the A&M System said there were no plans for the tradition to return. A spokeswoman for Perry, when given the opportunity to clarify his remarks, wrote in an e-mail that the governor had nothing to add to what had been printed.
Jess Fields, a student senator who supports bonfire's return to campus, plans on leading a "field trip" of student senators to the off-campus bonfire in coming weeks so they can better understand how the structure is put together. He said the discussion about bonfire began picking up last month.
"After Rick Perry's comments and after [Interim President R. Bowen] Loftin's comments in The Eagle that he didn't see student support ... no two statements could have riled up students more," said Fields, a junior political science major. "Perry has more or less started the conversation again with an offhanded comment."
Dustin Grabsch, a student senator opposed to the tradition's return, said most students aren't familiar with the extensive examinations of the issue conducted after the collapse.
"How can you say that someone 10 years later understands exactly what happened that night?" Grabsch said. "I don't think many students want to admit they don't know much about it. They jump on the bandwagon and say, 'I'm for bonfire,' but they don't understand what that means.
"Bonfire wasn't the Aggie spirit. It was a representation of the Aggie spirit," he said.
Former Texas A&M President Ray Bowen found in 2002 that an on-campus bonfire would cost as much as $2.5 million to construct the first year and as much as $1.3 million every year after that. He also estimated that liability insurance would cost $425,000 a year.
"We simply cannot spend this much money to construct a bonfire," he concluded at the time, though he noted that future presidents would have the authority to come to their own conclusions.
In February, if all goes as planned, Texas A&M will have a new president, as a result of the June resignation of Elsa Murano as the university's 23rd leader.
"It's assured that when the new president comes in, this issue will be there for them," Fields said. "The new president is not signing up for this, but that's what they'll be inheriting."
