John Sharp is retiring as Texas A&M chancellor, plans to stay engaged

Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp, seen here in 2022, is closing the book on a life in public service after more than 50 years.

Once John Sharp closes out a public service career that spans more than a half century when he retires as chancellor of the Texas A&M University system June 30, you probably won't find him sitting on the porch in a rocking chair.

"I'm not going to put Bermuda shorts on with black socks and play golf," Sharp, who is five weeks away from his 75th birthday, told the American-Statesman last week. "I'm going to do something else."

Without going too deep into specifics since he was technically still on the state's payroll, the former lawmaker and two-term state comptroller said he's toying with the idea of starting up a consultant firm. The conversation took place two blocks from the Texas Capitol, and given the proximity, it wouldn't be out of bounds to read "consultant" as "lobbyist."

Asked if such a reading was on target, Sharp offered only a half grin and changed the subject.

The conversation came just before an event on Tuesday hosted by the Texas Tribune that was sort of a valedictory for Sharp, whose first job in state government started in 1973 as a freshly minted graduate of Texas A&M, the flagship of the university system that he would rule for 14 years and oversee an unprecedented growth spurt that would include adding a law school, overseeing the country's nuclear laboratories and taking command of the state agency responsible for disaster recovery.

In a hourlong question-and-answer session with Tribune editor Matt Watkins, Sharp credited his Aggie staff for the still-ongoing expansion of the A&M system, which has a footprint in virtually every corner of Texas and a total student population north of 77,000. Despite his accomplishments in academia, Sharp could not help letting show a bit of ruefulness that his career in elective politics did not rise quite as high as he had once hoped.

If we rolled the calendar back 49 years, we find Sharp as a 26-year-old campaign aide for Phil Gramm, then an A&M economics professor running for the U.S. Senate. Gramm was a conservative Democrat, as were most successful Texas politicians at the time. But he made the mistake of challenging incumbent Lloyd Bentsen, who might not have been as conservative, but was much better known, and much better funded.

Two years later, Gramm set his sights lower and won a seat in the U.S. House. Sharp, meanwhile, set his sights higher than that of campaign aide and won a seat in the Texas House as a conservative Democrat in the mode of his mentor. It would be the first of a string of election victories that would bring him tantalizingly close, but only close, to becoming governor.

As Democrat Sharp climbed in the Texas political ladder in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, Texas voters in large droves were crossing the bridge — the one that would take them from being conservative Democrats to card-carrying members of the Republican Party.

And in his first term as comptroller in the early '90s when the Texas GOP bench was still anemically thin, party leaders invited Sharp to come aboard. After all, Gramm had made the switch nearly a decade earlier. So more recently did Sharp's one-time Aggie classmate Rick Perry. The very same Rick Perry who would defeat Sharp for lieutenant governor in 1998 and advance to the Governor's Mansion when George W. Bush was elected president two years later.

"For my own personal interest, I should have done it," Sharp said in the Q&A, referring to switching parties.

The reason for resisting the Republicans, Sharp said, was South Texas. While much of socially conservative rural East Texas and West Texas back then were gravitating to the GOP, socially conservative South Texas remained solidly Democratic. As a native of Victoria County, 130 miles southeast of Houston, South Texas was Sharp's base.

"My reference was always South Texas," said Sharp, who on Wednesday was awarded the U.S. Army’s Meritorious Public Service Medal for A&M's research in developing next-generation technologies for national defense. "That was my happy place, and still is."

Since leaving electoral politics, Sharp has worked closely with Perry, who put him on the path to the chancellor's office, and present Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Asked if he still considered himself a Democrat, Sharp showed he still knows how to walk a political tightrope.

"I pretty much dislike both parties," he said, noting the sometimes crippling hyper-partisanship that has long gripped Washington and now has its clutches on Texas.

If Sharp in his post-chancellor life goes ahead with his plans to form a consultant business that intersects with the Capitol, he'll probably need to keep his tightrope-walking skills tightly honed.