Just when I thought that Texas A&M University had avoided the kind of administrative warfare that has dogged the folks at the University of Texas-Austin, there go the Aggies in getting mixed up in a tussle over who should be the next president of the system’s flagship campus.
http://www.texastribune.org/2013/12/14/hussey-named-interim-president-texas-m-university/
The A&M System Board of Regents has unanimously named Mark Hussey to be the interim president of A&M-College Station, succeeding R. Bowen Loftin, who will leave soon to become chancellor of the University of Missouri.
It turns out Hussey was favored by Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp. Another prominent Aggie, Gov. Rick Perry, wanted an old pal, Guy Dietrich, to get the interim president job.
Sharp’s guy won out. Too bad for the governor.
This kind of dispute is troublesome. We’ve been witnessing the hassles occurring at UT-Austin with President Bill Powers’s fight with some of the UT System regents. Gov. Perry has gotten mixed up in that kerfuffle as well. The regents keep meddling in Powers’s administrative duties. Perry, strangely enough, hasn’t done a thing to get them to back off, given that Powers was hired to do the heavy administrative lifting at the Austin campus.
I’m now officially concerned that Hussey could be undermined by Perry-Dietrich loyalists as he seeks to run the College Station campus during its transition from the Loftin era to whomever will get the permanent job.
It also might signal a rift between Sharp and Perry, one-time political rivals who have made peace in recent years. Sharp lost the lieutenant governor’s race to Perry in 1998 by a narrow margin. It was reported then that bad blood brewed between the two former Aggies dating back to when they served in the Legislature together.
I hope it’s all a mirage, that the two men are bigger than to let old hostility resurface.
The Texas A&M University System deserves better — as does the UT System — than to let politics get in the way of effective university administration.