Elsa Murano

I’m Evan Smith, the editor of TEXAS MONTHLY.

At the home of the Twelfth Man, she’s the First Everything. It was only a few months ago that Elsa Murano became the first woman and the first Hispanic, as well as the first person under 50, to serve as president of Texas A&M University in College Station, the state’s oldest public university. In that job she succeeded Robert Gates, who left in late 2006 to become George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. Ironically, Murano herself had done time in the Bush administration too, serving for four years, from 2001 to 2005, as Undersecretary of Agriculture for Food Safety. In the years since, she was A&M’s Vice Chancellor and Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences; in the years before she was been a professor in its Department of Animal Science and the director of the Center for Food Safety in its Institute for Food Science and Engineering. A native of Cuba, 49-year-old Murano arrived in the U.S. at age fourteen and grew up in Miami. She earned a bachelor's degree in biological sciences from Florida International University and both a master's degree in anaerobic microbiology and a Ph.D. in food science and technology from Virginia Tech. When she stopped by to chat about all things Aggie in February, not long after she started her new job, two bits of news were very much on her mind: a massive recall of tainted beef, the kind of thing she dealt with routinely in her D.C. years, and the decision by Fidel Castro to step down as Cuba’s president. The latter was clearly a moment for reflection for someone who clearly remembers standing on the tarmac in Havana, at age 2, on July 4, of all days, waiting to board a plane so her family could flee its repressive homeland. For that young girl to grow up to be not just an academic but a university president, and not just the president of any university but of hidebound, myth-and-tradition heavy Texas A&M — well, who could have imagined it?

A conversation with Elsa Murano, on this edition of TEXAS MONTHLY TALKS.