re: An education on Texas A&M's history and traditions please

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Can't think of other schools that dropped the name, but there have been a few more I think.

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LSU, NMSU, KSU, Utah St, Cal-Davis off the top of my head. I'm unsure on schools like MSU, Auburn, and Clemson however.

The history of our school is somewhat complex bc we were one of 3 designated branches of the University of Texas (what is called that now was the 2nd created branch). The objective was to create one university with 3 distinct colleges. The AMC branch was the first college created and our charter actually wasn't changed til Rudder around 60.

What we today call UTx was the humanities college (located in the capital for good reason as it incl Hist, Poly Sci, Law, etc) but due to politics and money issues, the 3rd college was scrapped and it's charter rolled in there.

Then, again because of politics, the college in Austin was made into a University and began offering engineering. We fought for a good 10 years over what each school's goals and charters should be until they eventually split into two separate Systems. Because we only repped 1/3 of the original UT charter and they had 2/3, the land (which has led to what is called the PUF which is the primary endowment of both schools) was split giving them 2/3 and us 1/3.

Anyway, our history is not Texas A&M University. It's the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. This is true of many state schools in that they were not chartered as Universities. The Texas Aggies is more a designation of which portion of the University we were from. It actually predates traditional mascots and we just never gave it up (most of the others that did, did so when they changed to a full-fledged University).