UT Chancellor
Francisco Cigarroa
Notes from Evan Smith
"Think of the chancellor of a public university, particulary the chancellor of a sprawling public university system, as the CEO of a public company. He reports to a board -- in this case, the regents. He has employees of all types and stripes -- the faculty and staff spread among one campus or many. He has customers -- students and parents.
And he has stockholders, or maybe the better way is to describe them as stakeholders: the taxpayers of Texas, who are quite concerned about the way the money is rolling out and rolling out. And are, not incidentally, the government regulators who have purview over the quote-unquote company: the members of the Texas legislature. This is the world that Dr. Francisco Cigarroa, the still-new chancellor of the University of Texas System, encounters when he arrives at work each day, and he tackles the seemingly incalculable list of tasks before him with an efficiency, an enthusiasm, and a professionalism that, while not exactly corporate, would be at home in boardrooms and executive suites far and wide. Born in a storied Laredo family, 52- year-old Cigarroa earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a medical degree with highest honors from UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. After twelve years of postgraduate training -- including a stint as chief resident at Massachusetts General in Boston
-- he joined the faculty of the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio in 1995. Five years later, Cigarroa -- by then a nationally known pediatric and transplant surgeon -- was named president of the UT Health Science Center, a job he held until his appointment as chancellor in January of 2009. He is only the 10th person to ever serve in that capacity, and he has both big shoes to fill and the highest possible expectations to meet -- but like any good doctor, even more so than a good CEO, he has already demonstrated the ability to diagnose problems, the aptitude to cure them, and a bedside manner that's second to none." - Evan Smith, Texas Monthly Talks, Broadcast 10.29.09
