Texas A&M Taps Longtime Administrator as President

A familiar face is set to take the helm as Texas A&M University’s next president.

The Board of Regents named Susan Ballabina as the sole finalist for the job on Monday. Under Texas statute, Ballabina will hold that position for 21 days before a final vote.

While recent hires across the public university system have favored former Republican lawmakers, for Texas A&M the board instead went with a longtime system veteran in a unanimous vote. Currently the executive vice chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, Ballabina has served in multiple roles during her three-decade career, mostly at the flagship before joining the system in summer 2025.

“Having worked alongside so many dedicated members of this university for the past 30 years, I’ve seen firsthand the remarkable impact Texas A&M has on students, communities and our state,” Ballabina said in a university news release. “I am honored by the trust and confidence of the Board of Regents and Chancellor [Glenn] Hegar, and if given the opportunity, I look forward to building on the incredible work already underway and leading Texas A&M into its next chapter.”

She’ll replace interim president Tommy Williams, a former GOP lawmaker, who has led Texas A&M since October.

Under Williams, Texas A&M has moved to restrict discussions of race or gender ideology, closed its women’s and gender studies programs, censored the use of Plato in a philosophy course, and canceled a graduate course on ethics because of concerns about how race, gender and sexuality might be taught—all incidents that prompted concerns about academic freedom.

Now Ballabina steps into the job after months of turmoil and instability.

If formally approved at the conclusion of the finalist period, Ballabina will be the third permanent president hired since 2021. Both presidents before her left under fraught circumstances. Mark Welsh, a retired general who had led Texas A&M since 2023, stepped down in September under pressure from lawmakers. He came under fire for the way he handled a clash between a professor and a conservative student who objected to her discussing gender identity in class. Though Welsh soon fired Melissa McCoul, the English instructor at the center of the controversy, Republican lawmakers criticized him for not moving fast enough. Welsh had also faced scrutiny from donors and regents for being insufficiently conservative in deep-red Texas.

Welsh’s predecessor, Kathy Banks, also left amid controversy. She led Texas A&M from June 2021 to July 2023, when she retired abruptly amid a hiring scandal. While she had riled many faculty members with a plan to restructure parts of the university and make numerous programmatic changes, she was felled when news emerged that she had lied about her involvement in a decision to remove tenure from a job offer because of outside concerns about the candidate’s past work on race-related topics.

As a longtime administrator, Ballabina fits the profile some faculty members had urged the board to consider. Leonard Bright, president of the American Association of University Professors chapter at Texas A&M, where he also teaches public policy, said in an AAUP press call Monday afternoon that he had hoped the next leader would be an academic who had climbed through the ranks.

Still, Bright had expressed skepticism that that would be the case, noting that multiple public institutions across Texas are currently led by politicians with minimal or no experience in higher education. To Bright, such hires are designed to facilitate political crackdowns on what professors can teach, which he argued denies students access to learning opportunities.

Ballabina seems to land closer to his preferred profile, though he still had some hesitations. While glad to see someone from academe hired over a politician, Bright noted that she has spent her career on the staff side and not in the classroom. He cast faculty experience as particularly vital now amid censorship on campus and said he hoped she would stand up for the core mission of the university.

He’ll be watching to see if she will be a “tool for the board” or someone who will stand up for “the freedom to teach, the freedom to learn” and “to do research and follow our research wherever that takes us,” he said.

“We hope that she’s successful,” Bright said. “I always like to reserve my judgment for presidents.”