A waste of five million dollars.

That's how much it cost to build Texas A&M's memorial to what they're calling the "bonfire victims". Yes, they're spending a boatload of money to memorialize the 11 undergraduates and 1 graduate student who died, and the 27 people injured, when the annual bonfire for the pep rally before the University of Texas football game collapsed while they were building it. (This would be a "bonfire" that was 170 feet across, made of thousands of telephone-pole-sized logs, layered like a wedding cake, weighing over two millions pounds.)

The university's official report found both engineering/design problems and behavioral/organizational problems as root causes for the collapse (including the lack of any written design or professional review of design changes of the Bonfire, the lack of student knowledge concerning structural integrity in construction), but played down other factors, such as the cavalier attitude towards safety, seen in the high incidence of injury (8 to 10 times that of similar occupations, such as forestry or heavy construction), and the hazing, horseplay, and drinking that went on at the construction site (two of the students who died had blood alcohol levels well in excess of the legal limit for driving).

Five million dollars could have funded a lot of scholarships, which would have been a far better memorial to those who died in the collapse of the tower of logs. Well, it would be, at a school where education was considered important. But this is A&M, after all.