There will never be another John Sharp. 

It’s a sentiment shared by both his supporters and critics. The 74-year-old Placedo native will retire on June 30 as the longest-serving chancellor in the Texas A&M System’s history. To some, he’s almost saintly: a steady-handed guide in an era of ever-increasing polarization. To others, he embodies everything wrong with higher education: a yes-man who puts those underneath him on the line to appease those in power. 

What would his legacy be? He recalled being asked the question by Regent Sam Torn ‘70 last year. In response, Sharp began listing his accomplishments: The System purchased a law school that has since risen to No. 22 nationally; research funding across the 11 universities under him has topped $1.5 billion; the College Station campus is home to almost 80,000 students.

“And he said, ‘No, that’s not your legacy,’” Sharp recounted. “And I said, ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘We completely think — and the public completely thinks — different about A&M than they did 14 years ago.’ We’re no longer anybody’s little brother. We’re equal, and in some cases, much better.”

On Thursday, May 1, the outgoing chancellor sat down with The Battalion to discuss his legacy, tenure and next steps after 14 years in the position. A Blue Dog Democrat in a deep red state, Sharp has navigated a volatile era in higher education, serving as chancellor during President Donald Trump’s rise to the Oval Office in 2016 and re-election in 2024. With institutions across the U.S. facing unprecedented political pressure from his administration, the chancellor has stayed the course. 

All Sharp had to do was remain “out of the gun sights.” 

“Don’t get between [Trump] and Harvard, [Trump] and the rest of it,” Sharp said with a laugh. 

He praised Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins ‘94 and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s goal of restructuring the food pyramid and explained how he turned the “piece of shit” plot of land near Bryan into the technology-focused RELLIS campus it is today. When asked about the firings he enacted after becoming chancellor, he said it resulted in a 4% pay raise that staff across the System received afterward.

To outsiders, Sharp’s lectures are fluid, personal and original. But they’re often old hat to those who know him.

He speaks in statistics, reciting praise of the System like prayer: The moment A&M makes a positive headline, the achievement joins his stump speech for the next six months. Of the numerous stories Sharp told The Battalion, he repeated several to a crowd of administrators and alumni who gathered to celebrate him later that same night, some nearly word for word, some with the dates a little off. 

It’s a Sharp classic, one honed throughout his more than 50 years in public life. Rising from state legislator to comptroller and barely losing a run for lieutenant governor in 1998 — followed by a stint in private practice and more than a decade in higher education — there are endless stories to be told by and about the Texan. 

But, like many a fairy tale, it all started in Aggieland. 

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After graduating from A&M in 1972, Sharp began work as an analyst in the Legislative Budget Board before becoming the chief campaign aide for Phil Gramm’s U.S. Senate campaign in 1976. He was elected to the Texas House of Representatives after running unopposed two years later and began working his way up the political ladder, rising to state senator, railroad commissioner and then comptroller of public accounts, the state’s top accountant and tax collector, in 1990. 

When assembling his staff after the 1990 win, Sharp phoned Billy Hamilton, a former associate who had previously worked in the comptroller’s office for a decade. In Washington, D.C., at the time and craving a return home, Hamilton flew to Austin and met Sharp in his truck outside the Texas Railroad Commission building. The then-railroad commissioner outlined the restructuring of the agency he wanted to pursue, and Hamilton was interested.

“One of the things that was most attractive about the job was it was always sort of two things at once,” Hamilton said. “First, he was really serious about making the organization, which was already very good, even better. And second, he was willing to take on any challenge that came along, and then trust the comptroller’s office and our staff to pull it off. And I think we all felt challenged not to disappoint him.” 

That’s how the performance review came into being, Hamilton said. Under Sharp, the comptroller’s office conducted a review of the state government that ultimately found and slashed $10 billion in waste, helping ensure Texas didn’t have to enact a state income tax to balance the budget. Then-President Bill Clinton praised the initiative, launching a national version using Sharp’s framework.  

“He wanted recognition, and he wanted to do good work, but he wanted it done honestly and effectively,” Hamilton said. “And you know that you can admire a person like that.”

In 1998, rather than go for a third term as comptroller, Sharp ran for lieutenant governor. But after two decades of political success, this was where the ladder ended for the rising star. By just 2% of the state vote, he lost against the person who had, over several years, become one of his main rivals: his former college roommate. 

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Rick Perry ‘72 is enjoying life after public service. 

On a Tuesday evening in late April, the former secretary of energy and governor of Texas had a surprise in store; he had accepted an invitation to speak to the students of HORT 416, a course that teaches every facet of wine. Perry spoke for an hour on central campus about topics that had the professors smiling nervously at each other, jumping from praise of Rollins to his latest appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast discussing new pharmaceutical treatments. 

Surrounded by students asking for pictures, Perry agreed to take a few questions about his former adversary. 

“You know, I suspected that he was kind of getting at the end of his tenure over here,” Perry said. “I mean just, golly, longest-serving chancellor in Texas A&M history, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised. I think he’s the most consequential chancellor that we ever had.”

Sharp and Perry were college roommates in the 1970s and political rivals in 1998, and Perry was in the governor’s mansion when Sharp became chancellor in 2011.  

The duo rose to the top together: When Sharp was elected student body president at A&M, Perry became Senior Yell Leader the same year. After graduating, Sharp pushed Perry to run for office. Today, it’s a quote anyone will hear if they spend enough time near the chancellor: “My biggest regret is telling Perry to get into politics.” 

“If you think it was bad leading up to that [1998] election, you should have had to come to work the next day,” Hamilton said. “Because, you know, I think he was — he came so close. But he just ran into what turned out to be a sea change in Texas politics. I thought [Lt.] Governor Perry was a great, interactive governor. But I think Sharp could have been as good or better.”

Sharp’s political career never reached the same heights. Four years later, he would again attempt a run for lieutenant governor as the Democratic nominee, but the tide had turned. He lost by six points. The state hasn’t seen a Democrat in the role since. Rejected, Sharp stepped back from politics and joined a tax consulting firm. 

But the rivals wouldn’t stay hostile forever. Sometime after Perry’s win, Perry said he noticed Sharp at an event. After praying, Perry believed it vital to go up to him and repair the relationship. It proved to be worthwhile. Perry appointed Sharp as chair of the Texas Tax Reform Commission in 2005, a group created to modernize the state’s aging tax code.  

“I actually asked him to be chancellor before he took the job, but he couldn’t,” Perry said. “I want to say in 2010, I asked him to take it, and he said that he couldn’t because he needed to vest his stock.”  

Eventually, Sharp would take the job, beginning officially in August 2011. The first thing on his mind? 

The System needed a law school.

Rather than start from scratch, he purchased the stagnant Fort Worth-based Texas Wesleyan University School of Law for $73 million in 2013, renaming it to the Texas A&M School of Law soon after. Then, Sharp poured millions of dollars into building it up. 

The search for the new head of the school came next, and in 2018, it led the System to Dean Robert Ahdieh. The former professor recalled one visit to campus after being offered deanship; though Sharp wasn’t on his schedule — Ahdieh would only report to the provost and president — he still wanted to meet the chancellor. Sharp agreed, scheduling him for half an hour. 

They ended up spending triple that time discussing everything the law school needed to do to join the greats. 

“And after an hour and a half, he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go give this talk, I’m late for it,’ and he went off,” Ahdieh said. “And I was with the then-chair of the Board of Regents, Charles Schwartz, as well. And I told him, I said, ‘I’m sold.’ I said, ‘If that’s the vision for what A&M wants to accomplish with the law school, I want to be the dean of the law school.’” 

A decade ago, the school didn’t even rank in the top 100 nationally. In April, U.S. News & World Report ranked it No. 22 in the country.  

Next on the chancellor’s list was Kyle Field. Sharp would pursue nearly $500 million worth of additions to the stadium, even working with the City of College Station to implement a new hotel tax to finance the investment. By the end, it came out as the largest stadium in the state — 2,614 seats larger than that of the University of Texas at Austin. 

The progress didn’t stop there. Sharp helped secure a contract that allowed A&M to operate the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The chancellor personally attended a College Station City Council meeting to advocate for a proposal that would allow Amazon to bring its drone technology to the city; he added multiple agencies to the A&M System, ensuring Texans knew that it was A&M doing the legwork in the state. As of 2024, the System had a physical presence in 250 of Texas’ 254 counties.  

“The forest service used to be the Texas Forest Service,” said John Nichols, the mayor of College Station. “It’s now the Texas A&M Forest Service. And that was a branding effort on his part to say, here’s what Texas A&M is — not just Texas, Texas A&M.” 

The chancellor often cites one of his largest achievements as the RELLIS campus, the research-focused behemoth outside of Bryan that was, only a few years ago, a worn-down plot of land. Now, “in the Pentagon, there’s almost no one that doesn’t know the word RELLIS,” Sharp claimed. 

“Where he got the resources from to do all of this is way beyond me,” Nichols said. “One hundred and fifty million in the infrastructure alone at the RELLIS campus. But yet he went to Austin, and he got money for that infrastructure building out there, $70 million. He went to Austin two years later, got money for the Bush Combat Development Center out there. I mean, he just had the ability quietly to leverage, find and leverage, political connections to gain resources that are needed.”

Sharp’s prowess stood where his heart always did: politics. 

He doesn’t come from a background in higher education. But according to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, that’s why he’s so successful in the role. 

“He is the ultimate wheeler-dealer,” Patrick said during a phone call in late April. “And I say that in a positive way, not a negative way. He sets his sights on what he wants to accomplish, and he really doesn’t quit until he reaches his goal. And he will smile. He will shake your hand, he’ll pat you on the back. He’ll say nice things. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes, to accomplish his goals.”

Sharp’s success in the Texas Capitol is undeniable even to his biggest critics; it’s how the System’s budget has grown to $7.3 billion in recent years, how the state avoided passing legislation that would have devastated universities across Texas. When he announced his retirement in July 2024, Sharp stayed on for another year, largely to navigate the System through the upcoming legislative session. 

“You can say what you want, but being a member of the club is a big deal,” Sharp said with a smile. “I mean, I was a senator, I was a house member, and so I have the ability to go on the House floor anytime I want, the ability to go on the Senate anytime I want. And I don’t lie to them. I help them, I do things for them.”

In recent months, Sharp has helped push a bill that would transfer the University of Houston-Victoria to the A&M System, a move that would increase the number of universities under the chancellor’s watch to 12. When the Senate introduced a tenure bill in 2023 that experts worried would cause a brain drain in the state, Sharp and his expansive team of lobbyists worked to replace the legislation with a separate version — one that would instead enshrine the A&M System’s tenure policy into state law. 

“We went to the lieutenant governor in the leadership and said, ‘I want to show you what the tenure policy is at Texas A&M,’” Sharp said. “And so he looked at it, [Sen. Brandon] Creighton looked at it, and those people looked at it and said, ‘This is what we want.’ And so I came back to the folks here. That’s why you didn’t see them, our folks, doing a lot of testifying and stuff on the bill. You saw a lot of UT people going, ‘Oh, my God, the world’s falling in.’”

The financial and political background is what makes Sharp a good chancellor, Patrick said — a major reason why he believes Comptroller Glenn Hegar, his successor, will be able to step in successfully. But “there’s only one John Sharp.”

“There’s only one,” Patrick continued. “He’s a little P.T. Barnum, and he’s a little, he’s a little bit of everything.” 

Still, sometimes the state government can’t be avoided entirely. One prospective piece of legislation currently worrying faculty is Senate Bill 37, which, if passed — as Sharp suspects it will be — would put control of the curricula in the hands of the governor-appointed regents at the top of each university system and transform faculty senates into advisory bodies, a large shift from their current role overseeing vital university functions.

“If it doesn’t pass, I think we don’t get $300 million,” Sharp said. “I mean, the DEI bill was the same way. I mean, you know, everybody was kind of going, ‘What do we do?’ The votes are there to pass it, and if it doesn’t pass, a lot of universities, a lot of kids get punished because the appropriations ain’t gonna come. And then [SB] 37 is the same way.” 

That “DEI bill” — SB 17 — remains a struggle for Texas universities even two years after its passing. But the System pushed forward, even if it meant shuttering the flagship campus’ pride center. A DEI-related state audit earlier this year found only one violation at the Kingsville campus, which was “fixed pretty quickly,” Sharp said. 

Allegations of DEI persist, however. On the social media platform X in January, Gov. Greg Abbott said he may fire A&M President Mark A. Welsh III after posts spread online claiming the university was supporting a conference with DEI requirements, a threat that spurred a university statement it posted on its main account. Sharp said he had no clue where “that fire Welsh stuff came from.” 

Still, not all was always well among Sharp’s 11 universities. In 2020, student demonstrations erupted on the College Station campus by protestors who wanted to remove the statue of Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross, the university’s fourth president — and a general in the Confederate Army. It wasn’t until Sharp’s intervention, claiming the statue couldn’t be brought down, that the movement died out. But the System did add a statue of Matthew Gaines, a Black state senator who helped Texas establish A&M. 

Then came the nationally-watched Kathleen McElroy ‘81 scandal in 2023, in which a Black journalist set to lead A&M’s reestablished journalism program faced “DEI hysteria” from members of the Board of Regents and top administrators, who continuously watered down her job contracts until she ultimately turned down the position and returned to the University of Texas at Austin. The System settled with McElroy for $1 million a few weeks later.  

Just days after The Texas Tribune reported the McElroy news, the publication revealed another scandal: After A&M professor Joy Alonzo criticized the lieutenant governor during a talk, a student in the audience shared details with her mother, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham.  

Buckingham told Patrick, who then told Sharp. In a text message obtained by the Tribune between the two, the chancellor told Patrick that “Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.” Closing the message was his definitive “jsharp” signature. 

When asked, Sharp said he used the word “firing” because “that’s what I thought it was.”  

“I thought the investigations were about that,” Sharp said. “Shouldn’t have used the word fired, but … most investigations are used to determine whether somebody gets fired or not, or suspended or whatever. Probably shouldn’t have used that term. If I wouldn’t have used that word, it probably wouldn’t have been a story. But he did not say, ‘Hey, I think you ought to fire this person.’ His question was, ‘What the hell is this about?’”

The McElroy and Alonzo cases forced former A&M president M. Katherine Banks to resign abruptly, a shakeup that saw Sharp guiding his flagship campus through the most controversy it’s faced in years. He quickly called Welsh, then the dean of the Bush School, to ask if he’d step in as interim president.

“I wasn’t ready for that,” Welsh recalled. “And I told him that, ‘Well, let me think about this. I need to talk to my wife, because we’re getting ready to retire.’ And he said, ‘OK, you can have 15 minutes to talk to her.’ I said, ‘Well, she’s in a board meeting. I can’t talk to her for a while.’ He said, ‘Well?’ And he just paused. Did the subtle pressure technique.” 

Despite the seemingly endless number of controversies hitting the System over his tenure, Sharp stood steady at the top, remaining largely unscathed. He’s seen presidential administrations enter and leave, university administrators hired and fired, regents appointed and replaced. 

But even for Sharp, the job has become more difficult over the years. 

Hamilton, Sharp’s deputy when he was comptroller, joined the chancellor as his second-in-command at the System in 2013. He recalled wondering as a state worker whether Texas — dominated by rural Democrats at the time — would become more polarized. 

“We try to make adjustments,” Hamilton said. “And in general, I think we’ve done alright. A&M and the A&M System are a great product, and the legislature recognizes that, and it has relied on the System for a lot of things it hadn’t relied on — Hurricane Harvey rebuilding and stuff like that, no one ever thought to hand over to a university system in the past. And he’s the reason, I think he’s built a lot of trust. So, you know, I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s sometimes frustrating, it’s often tense and things like that, but it’s just the nature of the game, the full contact activity. So if you don’t realize that, you are going to get hammered. And you may get hammered anyway.”

A particular point of contention? The 10-member, governor-appointed Board of Regents. One member of the Board who spoke to The Battalion under the condition of anonymity to talk candidly described it as “two groups,” the more moderate appointees and the newer, conservative activists who have caused several of the controversies Sharp has had to navigate in recent years. 

But still: The regent was glad Sharp was departing. He believed the chancellor had become too powerful.  

“Too powerful,” Sharp repeated, flashing a grin. “If you have no power, you get nothing done.” 

His smile lingered. 

It lasted only moments before he went back to listing numbers. 

— 

Sharp took the stage to the sound of cheers and a few dozen whoops.

Every major figure on campus stared up at him: deans, top administrators, influential alumni. He repeated his stump speech and was gifted a custom painting by the Association of Former Students’ president, Porter S. Garner III ‘79.

It was a regular night for Sharp. Inside the association’s alumni center, he was treated as a celebrity. 

“We were here in school together,” Regent Bill Mahomes ‘69, who has worked with Sharp since he became a regent in 2015, said. “And so I’ve known him, and I’ve watched him and, you know, I think we couldn’t have made a better decision at the time for a chancellor than John Sharp. He’s really changed the place.”

Onstage, Sharp pointed to his right at Perry, laughing with him. Welsh took the podium and recalled memories of the chancellor, alumni raised glasses in his honor and members of his family posed for photos.  

It was a retirement celebration fit for someone of his stature. The chancellor will be off to start a company based on the communications firm Public Strategies in Austin alongside its former owner, the business executive Jack Martin.

When he sat down with The Battalion, Sharp was asked the question Regent Torn had posed a year earlier: What would his legacy be? 

“I think that we ain’t nobody’s little brother anymore,” Sharp said.

He paused. 

“We’re looking at our rear mirror for everybody else.”