Racism, Vivisection, and Other Horrors on the U.T. Campus

http://a4.vox.com/6a00cd972959d44cd500e398a9405c0004-500pi
Ole Miss, THE most Confederate campus in the nation.

When I first toured the University of Texas I couldn't help but notice a pattern in the various statues of men that appeared on the main mall on campus. Most of the men enshrined in stone were either leaders, politically or militarily, of the Confederacy or other leaders, such as George Washington, who "as everyone who has visited his plantation knows, he was a slave owner (Slavery and U.T.?)" . At the time, I thought it a little ironic that these statues were here. What did Jefferson Davis exactly have to do with the University of Texas? Why was Woodrow Wilson, the most racist president in the 20th century, also enshrined?
As a student of history, I soon learned that all of these statues were erected about the same time, around the mid 1910's, the midst of Wilson's presidency and a time when the Confederacy was romanticized. And ever since I learned that, I gave it no more thought. The statues represent an unavoidable history of U.T., much as the proud statue of Martin Luther King Jr. represents another aspect of Texan and American history. Texas used to be in the confederacy. We don't wave rebel flags at our games like Ole Miss, but we will never escape our confederate and slave owning history. I'm not proud of it, but I am also not ignorant of the fact that people a hundred years ago WERE proud of it. And that's the way it is.http://www.acigawis.co.uk/vivisection.jpg
On the confines of my treasured 40 acres another issue is brought up. Animals are experimented on or undergo vivisection in a windowless building where "there is no easily recognizable sign outside (Dissecting Vivisection)." I like to think U.T. is fairly progressive in its endeavors, so to hear that the University engages in possible research describes as "an archaic holdover from a less sophisticated era (Spiegel 71)." So what are my opinions about these suffering animals and the potentially useless experiments which they are subjected to? Well to put it bluntly, I really do not care. These working in this lab have a purpose for their actions, they are not being paid to torture animals for no reason. So I walk past this bland, windowless building, aware of what goes on inside and completely ambivalent. Does this make me someone without a conscience, a care for other living things? Perhaps, but for now, I have finals and passing my classes to worry about, not some decapitated quails.