Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp has announced he will be leaving the role next year, at a time when the university has been criticized for its leftward lunge towards embracing radical liberal ideology.
A former Democrat member of the Texas Legislature, Sharp was appointed to the position overseeing the Texas A&M system in 2011. In an interview with the Soros-funded Texas Tribune, Sharp expressed his desire to “always go out on top.”
“We’ve done some amazing things, and over the next year there’s going to be some more amazing things, and I’m not sure after this next year it can be topped,” said Sharp. “It seemed to be a pretty good time to say, hey, it’s been a great ride, and it’s time for someone else to take the reins.”
As the state legislature has pushed to rein in leftist indoctrination such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in Texas’ taxpayer-subsidized universities, Texas A&M—which had long been thought of as a relatively conservative institution—has increasingly found itself in the spotlight.
Senate Bill 17, which went into effect earlier this year, prohibits Texas universities from hiring employees to “perform the duties” of a DEI office and is supposed to block the promotion of policies, training, or activities “designed or implemented in reference to race, color, or ethnicity.”
In 2023, Texas A&M attempted to hire DEI-promoting professor Kathleen McElroy as the head of its journalism program at their main College Station campus, an offer she eventually turned down.
After the university’s president resigned from her position over the McElroy scandal, Mark Welsh, who had been the dean of TAMU’s Bush School of Government and Public Service since 2016, was appointed interim president.
He retired from the U.S. Air Force as a four-star general in 2016 but has faced criticism for his support of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles, his belief in white privilege, and his past position serving as an Obama-appointee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Despite Welsh’s support for ideologies that embroiled Texas A&M in a scandal, the Texas A&M Board of Regents appointed him as the new president of the flagship university in College Station.
TAMU also came under fire for planning to restrict the school’s responsiveness to public records requests after they received an open records request from The American Accountability Foundation. The request was regarding the TAMU nursing school’s support for DEI. TAMU claimed the requests were “threatening and amount to harassment.”
Most recently, A&M was forced to suspend its Title IX Director and begin an investigation after Texas Scorecard revealed his radical pro-DEI views and public disappointment that the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX did not go far enough in forcing schools to accept transgender athletes.
While Sharp told lawmakers at a committee hearing in May that they had removed eight DEI positions, during the same time, the University of Texas fired and eliminated hundreds of DEI and DEI-related positions.
Sharp says he will stay on the job until June 2025. The university’s Board of Regents, which is appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott and confirmed by the Texas Senate, will choose his replacement.
