Texas A&M University

It used to be one of the pleasures of travelling far from the east coast of America that the New York Times was as unprocurable as the South China Morning News. I hasten to say that I'm casting no aspersions on America's leading newspaper. The sort of pleasure I have in mind is like that of, say, a London businessman or lawyer who goes on a fishing trip to Scotland and discovers the pleasure of not having to keep up with the stock quotations or the law reports.

It was a special pleasure, particularly out west, to get up in the morning, inhale the crystalline air, walk past the false fronts of the little stores and see the clear line of the mountains on the horizon and duck into a lunch counter and settle to a breakfast of orange juice, cream of wheat, two eggs over easy, patties of country sausage – not what Americans call link sausages, but little pancakes of nothing but sausage meat, no skin, no bread, no lumpy gristle – with a side order of hash brown potatoes, hot toast 'oozing', as Max Wall used to say, with butter and as many cups of coffee as you could manage with no extra charge.

Even then, as an incurable newspaper man from an early age, I found it impossible to forego all newspapers. I also picked up the local gazette, something called The Tombstone Courier or the Deadwood Tribune, to discover what was on the minds of the locals. Of course, there'd be several agency stories on the front page, like 'Hitler Claims Germans Persecuted in Austria', 'FDR Condemns Big Business Practices', but you turned inside to see what was really on the minds of the Dakotans or the Arizonans, with headlines that took several years of living in America to grasp, like 'Score DA's Blind Eye to Wetbacks'. Score was a verb with the pronoun missing and meant that somebody was scoring, condemning the district attorney's indifference to the wetbacks, the Mexicans who were sneaking illegally across the Rio Grande by night. They now come in like an army on the march.

A favourite noun which has vanished from western newspapers was 'solon' – meaning that state's legislature's senators or representatives – as in 'Solons Score New Tax Drive', but in those far-flung days, weeks would go by when you never knew of anything that was troubling New York City and the east unless, as I vividly recall, even the smallest newspaper of the smallest western town had a front-page headline blazing forth the news, 'Prosecutor Grills Manton'. Manton was a federal judge of high standing, the first, I believe, ever to go to jail for the mysterious disappearance of $125,000.

Of course, you can still doggedly make a point of buying only the local newspaper but nowadays it amounts to an act of tough self-discipline to walk along a western street and not slip a quarter into a sidewalk machine and take out our new national newspaper, USA Today, as also, in the next machine, the nearest metropolitan daily.

These nostalgic thoughts came to me after spending most of a week in the heart of Texas where, every morning around eight o'clock, I walked along a corridor on the way to the cafeteria and slipped 50 cents into one machine for the New York Times, another in an adjoining machine for the Wall Street Journal, a quarter in another for USA Today and yet another for the Houston Chronicle.

Oh, by the way, my memory slipped a cog a week or more when I mentioned my first sight of Dallas and remarked on the fires blazing on the horizon where they were burning off the-then thought to be useless natural gas. Dallas has no oil thereabouts. It was, in fact, Houston.

A modest city, 50 years ago, which has since found oil under the living room carpet. I remember approaching Houston then at a snail's pace one night because about 30 miles out of town, the two-lane paved highway gave out and there was a sign saying 'Detour' and we had to go for 30 miles or so in a big, irregular arc back to the same highway. The road was something just one step up from a dirt road, not yet paved and of the sort known as a tin-roof road, with parallel ridges at three feet intervals. You could choose either to proceed with great care over one bump at a time or throw caution out the window and try to skim the ridges at 30 miles an hour. Sometimes this worked. More often you managed 20 miles before the axle slumped and the transmission began to groan and shudder.

Well, to coin a phrase, there've been some changes made. I was, as I say, deep in the heart of Texas at a university, an old university founded as an agricultural and mechanical college, hence, A & M, at the end of the last century – one of the colleges created, like most of the state universities, that is universities created by and for the youth of a particular state, with public money for free education. The first of them were known as land grant colleges, the federal government gave the land and the state taxed its citizens to provide a free college education.

If I had done, or were doing now, a television programme on education in America, I think I should have started with the university I was visiting. The picture would have opened with a shot taken apparently from a second-storey window, looking down on a path and a girl student coming along in a jumpsuit, cradling her books like a newborn babe. This, I would say, is a student at Texas A & M.

The camera would pull back and take in a male student behind her and then another and then, just coming into the picture, a young man resplendent in a grey uniform and cavalry breeches, a member of the university corps, army reserve corps. The cameraman, by now, had better be in a helicopter for, as we rise, the picture expands to take in lawns and an Italian Renaissance building and more lawns, fringed with trees and more big, flat buildings in a more or less uniform, modern style. We are in fact, beginning to encompass the campus. Encompass is a big word and is not as strictly accurate as the word 'beginning', for our own intrepid cameraman, and I can just imagine the unflappable Kenneth Macmillan, the incomparable cameraman on my America series, would begin to flap.

The question would disturb him pretty soon whether his helicopter was equipped to ascend into the stratosphere. For up and up and the campus widens, immense spaces flanked by more and more handsome buildings and rows of cottonwoods looking, by this time, like plumes of grey-green fog. Onwards and upwards at, till I should guess about, what, 20, 30,000 feet and, at last, we would encompass the whole campus. It is 5,200 acres. I don't know what your personal measurement of enclosed spaces is, but let me say for people who can recognise 120 acres from a train or an airplane, that the campus of Texas A & M could comfortably enclose 43 18-hole golf courses.

I did not, I need hardly say, walk all over this vast, scholarly landscape. I find it bad enough these days getting round 120 acres with the aid of an electric cart, but I mooched around most of the central part of it and visited the splendid libraries, plural, the architecture school, the biochemical lab, the engineering school, the petroleum engineering school in which Texas A & M is pre-eminent. The pre-medical school, the university newspaper building – no typewriters, everybody facing word processors – a part of the agricultural department. I did not wander enough among the breeding grounds or the herds of cattle that were dots on the horizon and the students' centre which, with its memorial halls and its own library and its clothing stores and candy store and exhibition halls for paintings and telephone rooms and study alcoves and reservation desk – it's also a hotel – and huge cafeteria and many private dining rooms. In all, about the size of the old Crystal Palace.

I did not get the impression as I was being escorted around, on this essentially country walk, of pressure or surging crowds. I guessed they must have, maybe, 2,000 students, housed at comfortable distances, though one student did tell me that if you were in a biology class and had to get to the medical school, you couldn't make it in less than half an hour at a fast trot. Well, there are 32,000 students, 11,000 of them living on campus, the rest in dormitories scattered over those ample acres.

The most indelible impression after four days among them was of a student body united by three things: general cheerfulness, conservatism and charming manners. More than three-quarters of them are Texans. It is, then, a very large university, a graceful and impressive university equipped beyond the dreams of any ancient or modern university I know, but at one symposium, a student said, 'We mean to make this one of the great American universities. What, in your opinion, is the test of a great university?'

This was red meat to a native Englishman and I had to swallow hard and resist the Englishman's most instinctive temptation which is to condescend to foreigners, most of all to Americans. I thought of a great western university and its... practically its team of Nobel Prize winners.

I said, 'Well, I'll tell you one thing. You don't measure a great university by the number of Nobel Prize winners it has collected on the faculty. My own idea is that the test of a great university is the intellectual quality of the average student.' There was a long, deep thoughtful pause.

A little later, the dean of the faculty said to me, 'You're right, of course, but shouldn't it also take in another average – the high common denominator of character and social behaviour?'

It was my turn to suffer a deep, thoughtful pause.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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