New Law to Send Texas A&M’s Interim Provost Pick to the Regents Aug. 27

The Texas A&M University System regents will meet Aug. 27 to approve an interim provost for the flagship campus in College Station — a campus hire that until last year would not have reached the board at all.

Texas A&M president Susan Ballabina named Jerry R. Strawser to the job on Aug. 20, effective Sept. 1, according to KBTX; neither the university nor the system had posted an announcement of its own. Strawser is an accounting professor who ran the Mays Business School for a dozen years, served as the university’s chief financial officer from 2014 to 2021, and held the interim provost post once before, in 2007 and 2008. He would replace Alan Sams, who told the campus in June that he would not seek another term; KBTX reported that Sams returns to the faculty.

The appointment reaches the regents because of a 2025 law that requires a governing board to approve or deny the hiring of a provost, and lets it overturn the hiring of a dean or a vice president. The same agenda carries the board’s annual report to the governor, the lieutenant governor, the House speaker and every legislator on the hiring decisions it has made under that law.

Three other items are certifications the board has to make before the state’s new budget year begins Sept. 1. Two of them — one on the 2023 ban on diversity, equity and inclusion offices, one on a 2025 law on foreign influence in university research — bar a university from spending its appropriation at all until its board certifies the previous year’s compliance. Both laws give an institution 180 days to fix a violation; miss that, and it loses out on funding increases in the next two-year budget. The third item, filing the system’s tenure and post-tenure review policies with the state’s higher education agency, falls due every Sept. 1 under a requirement that dates to 1997.

The session is a special one, called by telephone, and the notice says the board will go behind closed doors on personnel before returning, with every vote taken in the open. Ballabina, herself named president in May after a year of upheaval that cost her predecessor his job, has said she wants a permanent provost in place by January.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Robert L. Albritton — chairman; Fort Worth; chief executive, Mayfair Investments.
• Jay Graham — vice chairman; chief executive, Spur Energy Partners.
• David Baggett — Houston; managing partner, Opportune LLP; chairs the finance committee.
• John Bellinger — San Antonio; co-founder, Food Safety Net Services.
• James R. “Randy” Brooks — San Angelo; partner, BNB Ventures.
• Michael A. Hernandez III — Fort Worth; owner, D&M Leasing; chairs the audit committee.
• William “Bill” Mahomes Jr. — Dallas; of counsel, Bracewell LLP; chairman 2023 to 2025.
• Kelley Sullivan Georgiades — cattle rancher and executive, Sullivan Brothers Family of Companies.
• Sam Torn — Houston; camp owner; chairs the academic and student affairs committee.
• Lisa D. Cantu — Mission; student regent, non-voting; doctoral student at Texas A&M.

Roster from the system’s regents page and individual biographies, read August 21, 2026, and cross-checked against the governor’s appointment releases. Two hometowns are in conflict and are therefore omitted above: the system lists Jay Graham as being from Bryan while the governor’s release says Houston, and the governor’s release places Kelley Sullivan Georgiades in Houston while her biography names Galveston as her birthplace and Navasota as the base of her ranching operations. Randy Brooks’s biography no longer names a hometown; San Angelo comes from the governor’s 2021 release. Meeting contact: Vickie Spillers, (979) 845-9600.