John Sharp, Texas A&M University System Chancellor, talks in his office in College Station, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle)

Almost giddy, Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp calls me over to a bookshelf in his College Station office to look at a memento that hasn't been packed away yet.

He'd told me earlier about watching high-powered lasers tested on campus that could someday stop hypersonic missiles.

"Would you like to see the target?" he asks.

He hands me a cartoonish pint-sized figurine of Bevo, the Longhorn mascot of my alma mater, the University of Texas. It looks like it narrowly survived a nuclear apocalypse. Its ashen face and cowboy hat are charred black, its ‘hook em' hand signs are reduced to nubs and its painted-on white pants are missing where… they shouldn't be.

"I did not pick this – they did!" he's quick to say, referring to testers from a subsidiary of a company whose name he conveniently forgot. They'd started using A&M as a testing site when bureaucracy made White Sands, New Mexico too burdensome, Sharp says. He recounts how the first shot hit the figurine from a mile away, then a second, then a third. "Then the next, the last shot was right here," he laughs, pointing to the groin.

He's having so much fun, it's hard to get mad. So, I laugh, too, and I snap a photo.

"It's the damnedest thing," he says, marveling at the technology. "I don't know why it ain't in Ukraine."

Maybe it is. From Sharp's well-lit office festooned with winged and horned hunting trophies and framed newspaper clippings, all things seem possible. Not just because this skillful politician has turned Texas' collegiate stepchild into a golden child, but because he did it with charm, irreverent humor, endless curiosity and not an ounce of pretense.

"We ain't nobody's little brother anymore," Sharp tells anybody who asks about his greatest achievement over his 14-year tenure, the longest in A&M history.

John Sharp, Texas A&M University System Chancellor, talks about the painting in his office of a dance hall near where he grew up in Placedo shown in College Station, Thursday, May 1, 2025. He asked Austin artist Gordon Fowler to paint a typical 1950s Saturday night at the SPJST Lodge. (Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle)

Sharp, 74, will step down on June 30, handing the reins to longtime Comptroller Glenn Hegar, but before then, I wanted sit down and reflect on all he accomplished - and all he never could.

A moderate Democrat, Sharp was shut out of state politics in his prime nearly three decades ago as Texas turned red. A&M would come to benefit from the downfall of one of Texas' most consequential politicians, who made his mark in the Texas House, Texas Senate, on the Railroad Commission and as state comptroller. But Texans will never know what we lost. Sharp's success in College Station offers a clue.

Not so long ago, Texas Aggies were the butt of jokes about their intellectual acuity, better known as chivalrous bumpkins than potential Nobel laureates. Today, Aggies are co-managing America's nuclear arsenal at Los Alamos and no one bats an eye.

The unranked Texas Wesleyan law school in Fort Worth that Sharp acquired 13 years ago now ranks 22nd in the nation. Aggies run eight state agencies, including Texas' version of FEMA. With 11 universities, it has a presence in every major metropolitan area in the state, including the Texas Medical Center in Houston. It has gone from 11 members of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to 58. Spending on capital construction quadrupled to $12 billion. A&M's flagship campus is now one of the nation's largest, with 77,000 students.

The A&M space institute is building a massive moon terrain, and another simulating Mars, to train rovers for Houston's Johnson Space Center. Its "RELLIS" research facility is testing Army combat equipment and is the future site for four advanced nuclear reactors.

Not bad for the son of an oilfield worker and a schoolteacher from a farming community outside Victoria, Texas.

As lawmaker and comptroller, Sharp was as shrewd with political strategy and theatrics as they come, but he also got results. He cracked down on food stamp fraud by creating the debit Lone Star Card. He found a way to help families pay for college by creating the Texas Tomorrow Fund, which allowed pre-paid tuition at locked-in rates. He'd garnered national attention with state government performance reviews that staved off an income tax and touted billions in savings - kind of like Elon Musk's DOGE but without the chainsaws and the chaos.

Sharp was 48 when he narrowly lost his race for lieutenant governor in 1998 to his good-haired former A&M dorm mate Rick Perry.

Perry's resume was considerably thinner than Sharp's but Perry had changed parties from Democrat to Republican. Sharp refused, even when a top GOP official formally invited him to. He says he couldn't betray his steadfast friends in South Texas.

"They were all Democrats, they put their stock behind me and they would have been just devastated. That's why I didn't do it," Sharp tells me. "Of course," he adds, "it was a mistake" not to switch.

"You think?" I ask.

"Well, if I would have done it," he says. "I certainly would have had a better shot of being governor."

"And that would have been better than being chancellor all these years?" I ask.

"Well," he says, "There ain't no pictures of chancellors in the rotunda of the Capitol."

(Sharp's deputy chancellor and longtime aide Billy Hamilton later reminded me: "They've got a picture of Ma Ferguson in the Capitol rotunda, and who cares?")

But in the moment, I have no clever response.

"The good Lord takes care of fools, right?" Sharp says. "I'm thankful for this."

John Sharp, Texas A&M University System Chancellor, talks in his office in College Station, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle)

I ask if he really could have lasted as a Republican. Even if he meshed on abortion and fiscal issues, moderates are virtually extinct from today's GOP.

"As a matter of fact, I'm not enamored by either party," Sharp says. "I think that Jefferson was probably right – that political parties will be the death of the nation."

He says the culprit is redistricting, and he's right. Redrawing political maps into funny shapes to gain political advantage skews voting power toward one party until hardly any districts are competitive and people are even less motivated to vote. As I write, President Trump is trying to pressure Texas Republicans into a bonus session of redistricting.

Who will stand up to him? There are few John Sharps left. There are few people in power who care more about making government work than scoring points with billionaire donors and the base.

Even though Texas' political system chews up and spits out the problem solvers, we still need them. Even the partisans know that.

It's why Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Sharp hurricane recovery czar after Harvey in 2017. Sharp oversaw rebuilding efforts with trademark efficiency, even deploying A&M's county extension agents as liaisons between him and local governments.

It's why Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick listened in 2023 when Sharp persuaded him not to ban tenure entirely but to codify Texas A&M's tenure policy, which allows firing under certain circumstances.

"There's only one John Sharp," Patrick told A&M's student newspaper The Battalion in April. There could be more if our political system still tolerated mavericks.

As a leader, Sharp says his secret sauce is to encourage staff to pitch crazy ideas, with no fear of failure, and leave it to him to pick which to try. It's how he decided to turn an abandoned airfield into the RELLIS campus. And it's how he decided not to build a pipe-dream pipeline from Mississippi to Texas to solve our water crisis.

His other secret? An incredible battery life: "It doesn't ever cut off," says Hamilton, his longtime aide. "I've worked for people before who were, you know, a ball of energy for about a month and then they just sort of slow down. He never does that."

His great capacity and loyalty extended to his private life. During Sharp's time as chancellor, Charlotte, his wife of 42 years when she passed in 2020, fell ill with Alzheimer's and Sharp cared for her at their home, often forgoing travel or evening events so he could be by her side.

"About the first month or so after the Alzheimer's got really bad, I felt sorry for myself," he tells me. "I remember being pissed off – how did this happen to us?"

And then, somehow, his perspective changed.

"After about a month, it became a point of pride – it really did," he says. "I was kind of, ‘Hey, I get to take care of this person I love so much.' And I would never criticize anyone else but, these nursing homes – just not going to happen. So, yeah, I was there the whole time and happy to do it."

Sharp didn't escape controversy at A&M, but he responded with transparency and few incidents tracked directly to him. After the hiring of respected Black journalism professor Kathleen McElroy was quashed over apparent prejudice, Sharp issued a statement apologizing and saying those responsible "forgot our Core Values."

Even on issues as thorny as diversity and "DEI," Sharp is able to articulate nuance with a candor other leaders lack.

"We agree that we'd like the campus to look like all of Texas," he tells me. "You don't want a kid who's never made a B from Yates High School going to Harvard. You want him to go to the University of Texas or Texas A&M."

Admissions decisions should be based on merit, he says, but that must be paired by vigilant recruiting at underrepresented schools.

"The diversity got off track because of lazy bureaucrats," Sharp says.

When he leaves College Station, Sharp insists he isn't putting on his Bermuda shorts, black socks and playing golf all day. He's moving back to Austin to be with family and plans to join a political consulting firm. He says he doesn't have any pet projects on his mind.

I have some ideas: solve the water crisis. Find a use for the Astrodome. Hey, how about mend the fracture between Patrick and Abbott on marijuana and figure out how to regulate THC without a blanket ban?

Of course, we shouldn't have to pay a consultant to do that stuff. We should elect leaders like Sharp who consider it part of their job description and their duty.

Falkenberg is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has covered her home state of Texas for 25 years. Share your thoughts with her at [email protected] and sign up for her newsletter here.