Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp, who will leave the system in June, said there’s always been a close link between him and San Antonio.
Sharp recalls his childhood, waking up in the morning and listening to San Antonio radio legend Bruce Hathaway “banging a bunch of pops together” on KTSA.
“Mom would turn the radio up to get it to get us up. So San Antonio has always been close to me,” Sharp said, who grew up in the small town of Placedo.
During the city leadership’s trip to DC this week, the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce will honor Sharp with the Lonestar Statesman Award, a recognition of distinguished public servants who lead courageously and pursue opportunities for the betterment of the community and defend American values, a spokesperson for the Chamber said in a statement.
For Sharp, it seems that everything that goes around comes around, he said.
And it would be hard to deny Sharp didn’t use his leadership position to push for Texas A&M University System’s growth and development in the 14 years he was in office.
Sharp, a former legislator and elected statewide official, was hired to lead the system in 2011 and announced his retirement from the office last year.
During his tenure, Sharp secured $11.8 billion for 306 improvement projects across the A&M system, oversaw the development of a 2,000-acre high-tech campus called RELLIS for defense research and testing, and the system was chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration as part of a group to manage and operate the Pantex Plant, which maintains the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
But Sharp said the system’s biggest achievement during his time as chancellor was changing the way Aggies and people associated with the A&M system think of themselves.
“We’re nobody’s little brother anymore,” Sharp said. “We’re one of the strongest, best university systems that exist anywhere in the nation.”
Sharp was also involved in the development of Texas A&M University-San Antonio, which is located on the city’s South Side and serves 8,000 students.
In 2015, the state legislature approved the school to begin accepting freshmen and sophomore student applications. In 2022, TAMUSA partnered with University Health on a $550 million investment for public health in Bexar County.
“A&M-San Antonio is really just at the beginning of what it’s going to be,” Sharp said.
This year, TAMUSA celebrated its first-ever homecoming week, continues construction on an early childhood school and broke ground on a new athletics field.
TAMUSA President Salvador Hector Ochoa said Sharp left an extraordinary impact on the state’s higher education.
“At our university alone, he has helped oversee a historic building boom and supported many milestone projects, including most recently, a new student residence hall, recreation center, a public health and education academic building, as well as Educare San Antonio,” Ochoa said in a statement. “I’d like to personally congratulate Chancellor Sharp on his remarkable tenure with the A&M University System and thank him for everything he has done to help make the university such an important educational resource for San Antonio and beyond.”
Sharp predicts that in 10 years TAMUSA will be the second-largest university in the A&M System, falling only behind College Station. And as long as the state legislature keeps supporting the San Antonio campus, Sharp said TAMUSA will keep building on its “momentum.”
Other San Antonio leaders share thoughts of gratitude toward Sharp.
“We can’t think of a more deserving honoree than Chancellor John Sharp,” said Jeff Webster, president and CEO of Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. “He will go down in the history books as one of our state’s greatest public servants and arguably the best Texas A&M Chancellor.”
As for higher education turning into a political battlefield in the state legislature, Sharp maintains that A&M remains a conservative institution with a good reputation among the state’s overwhelmingly right-leaning political leaders.
Republican state senators threatened public universities with withholding funding after a report found that some schools were violating Senate Bill 17, a bill passed in 2023 banning the use of any diversity, equity and inclusion offices and programs in state-funded universities starting Jan. 1, 2024.
The State Auditor’s Office report, released on Friday, reviewed the Texas A&M University System and found one violation, in which its Central Texas university’s contract with a vendor included unsolicited DEI work.
“I think one of the reasons that some in higher education have problems is because they don’t match up well with their elected officials. Their elected officials may have a more conservative bent and and sometimes in higher education, it’s more liberal,” Sharp said. But A&M doesn’t have that problem, he said.
Sharp says his work won’t end when he steps down from the chancellor position this summer. The Texas leader plans to form a consulting company based out of Austin, but did not specify what kind of industries he would be consulting with.
When asked how he dealt with the pressures of leading a system with so many stakeholders — 11 universities, eight state agencies and more than 150,000 students — Sharp said he’s adopted the Sam Houston mantra.
“Do right and to hell with the consequences.”
