Chancellor’s moves blazing a trail to A&M
COLLEGE STATION — John Sharp talks about Michael Young with all the pride of a rancher praising a prized piece of livestock.
“I have got a hooking bull on that A&M campus now, and all I have to do is keep him fed,” Sharp said of Young, the new Texas A&M University president.
Sharp, the A&M chancellor, shocked many across the nation when he announced he had stolen away the president of one of the country’s top public research institutions, the University of Washington.
“I sure did have a lot of people saying, ‘How the hell did this happen?’ ” Sharp recalled.
Sharp and Young have acknowledged that the answer, at least in part, was money. Washington was squeezing higher education funding, and, while Texas spending on colleges and universities has remained relatively flat in recent years, Sharp has had the money flowing at A&M.
Young isn’t the only person to have noticed. By redirecting more than $150 mil-
lion in state funding toward research endeavors and launching a program aimed at bringing the nation’s top minds to campus, A&M has joined the nation’s top 20 universities in research spending and has lured four members of the prestigious National Academies. A&M’s progress caught the eye of Gov. Greg Abbott, who wants to elevate Texas universities to compete nationally. Abbott modeled the new statewide Governor’s University Research Initiative, aimed in large part at recruiting top researchers, after Sharp’s work at A&M.
“The trail for this gamechanging success is already being blazed” in College Station, Abbott said in his state of the state address earlier this year.
‘Through a glass, darkly’
Alan Needleman’s perception of A&M, as he says it, was “through a glass, darkly.”
“It was sort of fuzzy,” said Needleman, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering who spent much of his career at MIT and Brown University — until he won a sort of lottery he didn’t know he had entered.
Needleman was offered a fellowship through A&M’s new Institute for Advanced Study. For a year, the program pays participants a salary, covers living and lab costs and offers doctoral students to help the nation’s best researchers.
Needleman’s work with younger “rising stars” — as the program’s creator, John Junkins, calls them — was enough to convince him to stay at A&M.
The institute has become a powerful faculty recruiting tool in its four years of existence. With funding from the $100 million chancellor’s research initiative, A&M has permanently lured four of the 22 faculty who have visited under the institute, including Christodoulos Floudas, another member of the National Academies, from Princeton. Floudas will lead a new Energy Institute at A&M.
“It’s the mother of all sabbaticals,” said Junkins, a professor of aerospace engineering who launched the institute. “We make it downright irresistible, frankly.”
The institute was a costly investment that Junkins had been unable to sell to past A&M leaders. Then Sharp came along and the two went to lunch — a lunch that, as Sharp tells it, Junkins wasn’t going to conclude until Sharp wrote a check for $5 million. Sharp bit, kicking in $5.2 million. Junkins was able to match it with funding from the flagship and donations from A&M faculty — some of whom donated their life savings — to build enough seed funding for a five-year trial run, now in its fourth year.
Sharp created the chancellor’s research initiative by redirecting $100 million in state funds from 2013 to 2015. This year, Sharp kicked in another $52 million. It’s the model Abbott’s new statewide initiative is based on.
The pool Sharp pulled from, the Permanent University Fund, is a state-owned investment fund that funnels billions to A&M and UT exclusively.
Such spending is, at least in part, what attracted Young to College Station. Sharp flew to Seattle to pitch A&M’s opportunities to Young and weeks later, in February, A&M announced that Young would be the flagship campus’ next president. Young’s discussions with Sharp convinced him that while many universities are talking about the importance of research, Texas A&M understood the true importance of such work.
“Here at A&M you have this visionary chancellor who actually gets that point ... who really sees that point — that the future of Texas and the future of the U.S. and the world depends on this research,” Young said.
Sharp knows it was the research funding that attracted Young, and he plans to keep it flowing, even if it means getting creative — and at times controversial. One of Sharp’s most contentious decisions came in 2012 when he outsourced the jobs of more than 1,000 landscaping, building maintenance and custodial employees. Hundreds of workers protested in the system offices, but the chancellor persisted. It’s a move UT has explored as well.
The savings at A&M, Sharp says, will amount to more than $200 million over a few years.
Astronaut food
In a spare lab smothered by the smell of an elementary school cafeteria, a small, green plastic pouch is labeled “Crawfish Etouffe.” It’s Cajun fare to be consumed in space and it’s prepared at A&M — one of a few locations in the country making the astronaut food.
Researchers in the lab make the food last with an electron beam — a stream of hyperactive electrons shot through food and other products to kill bacteria. This is A&M’s National Center for Electron Beam Research, the world’s leading academic and research organization focused on the technology.
This type of research isn’t new at A&M.
Like the electron beam lab, where food from fruit to hamburger patties is cleaned with this form of radiation, A&M’s medical school has been around for years. But according to Sharp, a recent poll showed that fewer than half of the residents of Brazos County, where A&M is located, knew about the school.
Branding move
So Sharp pulled the Health Science Center from under the system and rolled it into the flagship university. It was a branding move that also brought all of the center’s research funding with it, helping to catapult A&M five spots in one year to 19th in research spending, according to an annual ranking by the National Science Foundation.
Medical research makes up much of the work done at many U.S. universities, and National Institutes of Health financing is a sought-after resource that A&M wants to tap further. In one of his first big moves as president, Young abruptly forced the head of the Health Science Center, Brett Giroir, to resign earlier this month. According to Giroir, Young told him that he wanted to take the center in a different direction, after even more NIH money. Giroir wasn’t satisfied with the reasoning. Under his watch, Giroir says the center brought in 68 percent more federal funding in one year, though A&M officials dispute that figure, arguing the bulk of the medical school’s new funding that year came from its merger with the flagship.
Young said he wants to expand the medical school, ideally bringing in more research funding in the process, and push it to collaborate with other parts of the university, like the agriculture school. Many infectious diseases begin in animals before they spread to humans, and A&M can be at the forefront of research to prevent that, Young said.
‘We just dominate’
A&M’s progress can be seen on the science foundation ranking, where it passed UT Austin, which ranked 31st. Bolstered in large part by expanded agriculture and engineering research, but also by the addition of the medical school, A&M was the only school in Texas to make the top 20. It spent $820 million on research in 2013 — nearly $350 million more than a decade before.
“I think in research, our competition’s not in Texas anymore. There’s just nobody who can stay in the same room,” said Sharp. “They’re all nice people, but they ain’t in our class. We just dominate.”
That may be supported by NSF’s list of spending, but Austin still outpaces A&M on many measures, including the number of National Academies members it has counted among its faculty. UT has had more than 70, compared to the 40 that have worked in College Station. The research spending race will likely get tighter soon, too, as UT plans to open the Dell Medical School in Austin next year.
But the competition between Texas’ top two schools matters less than the race between Texas and states like California, many believe.
“We’ve got two great public research universities in the state and they’re big and they’re growing and attracting a lot of attention and a lot of jobs,” said Gerry Griffin, an A&M alumnus who worked as director of the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston and is a former member of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. “I don’t think it makes much difference between UT and A&M. I think it does make a difference between Texas and the rest of the U.S.”
‘Gig ’em Aggies!’
When A&M announced it had snagged Young from the University of Washington, its success in luring the leader of one of the nation’s top research universities was widely praised — but one voice stood out.
Billionaire businessman B.J. “Red” McCombs — a Longhorn diehard whose $50 million donation to the University of Texas planted his name on Austin’s topnotch business school — uttered some words considered heresy by the burnt-orange crowd: “Gig ’em Aggies!”
“Congratulations on snatching the best President you could possibly ever find,” McCombs said in a statement at the time. “The Longhorns have really got their work cut out for them now.”
But to many, A&M’s reputation — likely more associated with football than with lab work among the general public — has yet to catch up. That’s where football comes in — at least symbolically. The school’s multimilliondollar renovation of Kyle Field and jump to the SEC will help put A&M on the nation’s radar, Sharp says.
“That stadium to me is not a football stadium, that is a big megaphone that speaks to the rest of the country, gets their attention and then they look at A&M and see all of the rest of the stuff here,” Sharp said. “Here’s one thing that is darn true about A&M: Every single time I have asked someone to come here and look at A&M for a partnership or to recruit them ... they come here and spend a couple days and go, ‘My God. I had no earthly idea this stuff was here.’ ”
When wildfires drew national attention to Texas in 2011, A&M’s Texas Forest Service was a main force fighting the blazes. But not enough people knew it was Aggies fighting the flames, Sharp said.
The system has worked to rebrand its various arms, like the forest service, “back to the mothership,” Sharp said. That mothership is also being more closely tied to the flagship. Earlier this spring, the system changed its logo from a ‘T’ with a star to the more recognizable ‘ATM’ logo more closely associated with the flagship school and its football team.
The move caused some controversy; more than 15,000 people have signed a petition online calling for the system to switch back to the traditional logo.
But Sharp said the move is looking to A&M’s future.
“The brands have to speak as one,” Sharp said.