Katie Farmer ’92 (MBA ’96) is president and CEO of BNSF Railway, one of North America’s largest freight rail networks. In 2021, she became the first woman to lead a Class I railroad, guiding 37,000 employees who keep goods moving across a 32,500-mile system. A proud Horned Frog, Farmer is also a TCU Trustee and parent of two alumni.
Her TCU journey began when she arrived from Chicago as a first-year student who didn’t know a soul in Fort Worth. She found connection through her professors, the Neeley School of Business and her sorority — friendships that continue to anchor her life. That sense of belonging inspired her children to choose TCU for themselves.
Farmer remainscommitted to her alma mater, supporting fellow Frogs through the Career Centerand the BNSF Neeley Leadership Program. She often returns to campus to speak with students about leadership, blending real-world lessons from her 30-plus years at BNSF with TCU’s emphasis on values and community.
She believes leadership is not only about what you accomplish but how you achieve it — by listening, empowering teams and embracing change. “To those who much is given, much is expected,” she said. “I take joy in paying it forward.”
Farmer shared some of her leadership wisdom with TCU Magazine.
What was it like arriving at TCU as a student?
I came from the North Shore of Chicago and didn’t know a soul in Fort Worth. But the moment I stepped on campus, I felt that TCU connection. I found it in my professors, my sorority and my business school peers. Those people became lifelong friends — we’ve walked through weddings and babies together. Years later, when my kids were making college choices, we never pushed them toward TCU. But my son said, “We just want what you and Dad have.” That was powerfulbecause it showed that sense of community carried on to the next generation.
You stay closely involved with TCU. Why?
TCU shaped my life, so it’s my responsibility to give back. At BNSF, we support the Neeley Leadership Program and the Career Center. Once a year, I return to the classroom to talk with students. It’s a joy. I get to share what leadership looks like in the real world, and I always learn from them, too.
You’ve been at BNSF for more than three decades. How did those experiences shape your leadership?
I started as a corporate management trainee and worked in engineering, operations and marketing. Those roles taught me empathy. I’ve seen firsthand what our employees do every day. Today I’m fortunate to lead 37,000 men and women who are proud of the difference they make, both in communities and in the global supply chain.
What leadership lesson do you swear by?
Listen more, talk less. At BNSF, our leadership model starts with communication, and the first rule of communication is listening. The people closest to the work know what needs to be done. My job is to empower them and make sure they have the tools to succeed.
From her TCU beginnings to the boardroom, Katie Farmer credits her Horned Frog community for shaping the leader she is today. Photo by James Anger
How do you keep developing after 33 years at one company?
Change is constant. I make it a priority to do one thing every year that scares me, something that pushes me outside my comfort zone. I’ve testified before a Senate subcommittee. I’ve given speeches where I had to be funny, which is not my natural style. Those experiences keep me humble and growing.
What advice would you give students about building a career?
Keep your development a priority. Don’t get too comfortable. Challenge yourself to change before you’re forced to change. And remember what really matters. For me, it’s a triangle: faith, family and purpose. Sometimes one side stretches longer than the others, but balance comes from always returning to those three points.
In this new series, TCU Magazine visits with alumni in the food and beverage industry. Send recommendations to tcumagazine@tcu.edu.
The year he graduated, Cooper Neel ’24 launched Coop NeuroRefreshers, a line of sparklingteas crafted with medicinal herbs to fuel the mind; his goal is to serve and give back to those with learning differences. Neel, who grew up with multiple learning differences, began by concocting drink flavors in his home kitchen in the Philadelphia area. CoopNeuroRefreshersare now produced in New Jersey and sold online and in select grocers and retailers in the Northeast.This fall, the line of beverages is coming to Whole Foods locations in Fort Worth and Dallas.
What is a NeuroRefresher?
We’re trying to create a new category of beverages —NeuroRefreshers are sparklingiced teas designed to invigorate and enhance mental wellbeing. We have eight herbs in it: lemon balm, reishi, passionflower, holy basil, ginseng, angelica, ashwagandha and lion’s mane. All these different herbs work together to create this delicious, healthy but also brain-boosting tea. We really wanted to make it a better-for-you energy drink. When we went to pick the ingredients for the drink, we were very intentional about it being non-GMO and natural ingredients.
What are the flavors and which is your favorite?
We have two caffeinated varieties: the Mango SparklingYerba Mate and the Raspberry Lemon SparklingGreen Tea. And we have two caffeine-free varieties:Strawberry Jalapeño SparklingRooibos and the Blueberry Lavender SparklingChamomile.I love them all, but if I had to pick one, I love the strawberry jalapeño.
How did your degree in communication studies help with starting a business?
What I love about communications is it’s very versatile; you use it in many different industries.Whenever I pitched the product, the Communicating Effectively courses I took really helped me. A big part of getting your product into stores is being able to talk to managers about your brand in a succinct but meaningful way.
One-fifth of Coop NeuroRefreshers’ profits go to the Coop Learning Differences Fund. Photo by Eric Schaeffer
What was the process of starting your business?
I started in the kitchen experimenting with different teas, berries and ingredients, boiling them together like a syrup and then mixing it and having family and friends try it.The hardest part is that doesn’t translate into being able to put it into a can. You have to find a company — they’re called flavor houses or beverage development companies — and they take that kitchen formula and create it and scale it up so it’s commercially viable.
Then you have to create the brand. Ourcan design is very unique because we worked with an artist in the UK,Matt Johnstone. What’s cool about our Coop logo is that each of the different letters depicts a different learning difference. The C is dyslexia, the O is dyscalculia, O is dyspraxia and the P is dysgraphia.
You’ve got to build a website. You have to go and pitch the product. What my intern and I were doing last summer was going door-to-door in my hometown, Villanova, Pennsylvania, telling the story about Coop NeuroRefreshers.
What’s next for your business?
Get into as many doors as possible; the ultimate goal is to support people who learn differently. I really want to use it to show kids who learn differently that there’s nothing that they can’t do. When I was growing up, I was discouraged and at one point I didn’t even think I would go to college.
We are going to give a portion of the proceeds to different organizations dedicated to learning differenceslike AIM Academy, which is the high school I went to for bright kids who learn differently. They really help you figure out how to advocate for yourself, which played a big role when I came to TCU.
Editor’s Note: The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
In this new series, TCU Magazine visits with alumni in the food and beverage industry. Send recommendations to tcumagazine@tcu.edu.
When Adrian Gonzalez ’96relocated to East Tennessee in search of a slower pace of life and an alternative to the corporate world, hestarted a series of food truck businesses, leaning on his background in marketing. After trial and error, Gonzalez landed on a food truck concept he said nobody else was doing — cobbler. Crazy for Cobbler has gained a following as Gonzalez travels from small town to small town with his food truck, sharing his take on the classic southern dessert.
What makesthe peach bourbon pecan cobbler your best seller?
Part of the food truck magic, in my opinion, is to do something just a little bit either elevated or off-beat.You see a lot of bourbon pecan things in the marketplace these days. We knew those two flavors paired well together, and we figured it would work with peach.
Bourbon caramel has kind of a brown sugar flavor so it adds a whole other dimension, whereas the peach cobbler is just straight-up sugar.
Whichcomponent makes or breaks a cobbler?
My make-or-break component — and I’m pretty passionate about this — is the cobbler crust.
The crust is a batter mix that goes in the bottom of the pan. You put the fruit on top, and then during the baking process, the crust makes its way through the fruit mix, dragging with it all those fruit flavors, and it floats to the top and creates the crust.
The texture is somewhere between a dumpling and a sugar cookie, because the top gets just a little caramelized and crunchy, but then the middle of the cobbler — that part of the crust is more like a sugar cookie.
We think the crust is the secret to our success. We’ve had 85-year-old women come back and say, “I’ve been eating cobbler my whole life, and this is the best I’ve ever had.”
What’s one cobbler flavor you would love to experiment with?
I’m thinking about putting cocoa powder in the crust and pairing that with the cherry cobbler, which would be like a chocolate-covered cherry cobbler situation.
I’ve also thought about doing mini chocolate chips in the crust and doing almost like a cookie-dough crust, which I’m thinking probably would pair well with the apple.
Then I want to revisit blueberry,but use some cornmeal on the crust to do kind of a blueberry cornbread cobbler, which I think people would also really enjoy because it’s different but not super scary.
How has the East Tennessee community responded to your business?
One thing I wasn’t aware of til moving here is how incredibly tight knit these communities are, and they go back generations. East Tennessee people are very friendly, and they are avid supporters of small business in a way I’ve never seen.
We have found a sweet spot in going to these smaller towns. Some of them have a population of 3,000 to 4,000 people, and other food trucks ignore them.
Once we connect with people in these smaller cities, they do become avid fans, and they will message us ahead of time and comment on everything we post.
One of our sweetest, most loyal customers in Jefferson City brought us a Christmas card during the holidays. She also brought her daughter and family to visit the truck.
Editor’s Note: The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
On an unseasonably cold and rainy day in October 2018, about 100 people gathered inside a campus auditorium. The dedication of TCU’s Native American Monument was supposed to be held at the granite marker itself, placed near a heritage oak tree between two buildings constructed in 1911. But the weather had driven the group inside.
The crowd included TCU community members and leaders from the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, whose ancestral land the TCU campus now occupies. The Wichita nation had brought traditional drums for the occasion, and university officials presented the delegation with blankets and tobacco grown by a Native student’s family.
J. Albert Nungaray served on the committee that developed TCU’s Native American Monument. Dedicated in 2018, the monument acknowledges the Native people who have lived on the land where TCU now stands.
J. Albert Nungaray ’17 rose to speak. As he surveyed the crowd, he still couldn’t believe he was a key part of the effort to honor Native American heritage at his alma mater. Nungaray, who is of Tewa and Wixarika descent, grew up in poverty in El Paso. Many of his peers did not finish high school, much less college.
After working for a few years, Nungaray had completed community college and transferred to TCU. He didn’t meet a single other Native person during his first two semesters at TCU. But in his second year, he became friends with a fellow anthropology student who was a citizen of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana. The two formed a Native and Indigenous student association, reviving an effort started more than a decade earlier by students including Tabitha Tan ’99.
Nungaray later served on the committee that developed the monument and its text, which respectfully acknowledges all Native people who have lived on the land.
Standing in front of the group assembled for the dedication, he felt like he had finally accomplished something with his life. “I felt like I’d actually done something to make myself, my people and my family proud of me,” he said later. “That monument is for everybody. Those words are for everybody. And they’re words that are going to live on long after I’m gone.”
The monument is a visible reminder of TCU’s Native American and Indigenous Peoples Initiative, which seeks to build relationships with Native communities, help non-Native students learn about Indigenous culture and transform TCU into a welcoming space for Native students, faculty and staff.
Launched in 2015 as a grassroots effort, the initiative has become a university priority. An annual symposium and numerous guest speakers teach students about issues important to Native nations, such as tribal sovereignty and the disproportionate rates of violence against Native women and girls. Recently hired Native faculty have created courses in Native history, literature and culture.
The university’s land acknowledgment, which recognizes that the campus is built on land taken from the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, is read at convocation and commencement and posted in all residence halls. Students have attended and volunteered at powwows and learned from members of the local Native community.
Area museums, churches and schools have looked to TCU for guidance as they embark on their own programs to build bridges with the Native community. Still, people active in the projects said that these accomplishments should be seen as just the start of a larger journey.
“TCU has been careful and thoughtful in its work with Native communities,” said Wendi Sierra, associate professor of game studies in the John V. Roach Honors College and an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, Turtle Clan. “It has always been done in a spirit of reciprocity and a spirit of open desire to understand and to collaborate. We’re building slowly — but we’re building thoughtfully, and that’s the right way.”
“That monument is for everybody,” said J. Albert Nungaray, an alumnus of Tewa and Wixarika descent. “They’re words that are going to live on long after I’m gone.”
Local, Living History
TCU’s outreach to the Native community began with Scott Langston, a now-retired instructor of religion who is also a scholar of history. Sensing that his education had omitted Native American perspectives, Langston, who is white, in the early 2000s started reading works by Native authors, attending events and volunteering with the Native community.
In 2015, he drove to Oklahoma City to visit with Chebon Kernell, a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, a Muscogee/Creek ceremonial leader and an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church. Langston invited Kernell to speak to his religion class about the perspectives of Native American Christians and healing relationships with Indigenous peoples, offering him an honorarium and reimbursement for his travel costs.
The classroom was packed with students from multiple classes, including those of Theresa Gaul, professor of English, who has taught courses in Native American literature.
Energized by the event, Gaul, Langston and Kernell began to plan TCU’s first Native American and Indigenous Peoples Day Symposium, which occurred in October 2016. That day’s events drew 1,000 participants, including numerous members of the Dallas-Fort Worth Native community.
Gaul, also director of TCU’s core curriculum, said meeting those neighbors was rewarding. “Too often in academe, we can live in an abstract, intellectual world of questions and issues and problems,” she said. “Doing work with living people has been really transformative and has helped to shift a lot of my teaching and research to the idea of the local and to take up topics that are connected to where I reside in Texas.”
The symposium is one of TCU’s efforts to improve what Kernell called the “Native American literacy rate” on campus. When they arrive at TCU, most students know very little about Native culture or issues, leaders of the initiative said. What information they did learn in school is typically about the past; it’s not uncommon for students to assume Native people are extinct. Few are aware that the 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States today are sovereign nations with their own governments and, in many cases, thriving businesses on and off reservations. Nearly 40 of those nations, including the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, are headquartered in Oklahoma.
“TCU has been careful and thoughtful in its work with Native communities. It has always been done in a spirit of reciprocity and a spirit of open desire to understand and to collaborate.” Wendi Sierra
Texas is the site of reservations for three federally recognized tribes: the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas in the Big Thicket region; the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas outside Eagle Pass; and the Tigua people of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo near El Paso. But Native people — members of tribes that are federally recognized, state-recognized or neither — live throughout the state. The Dallas-Fort Worth area is home to well over 100,000 Native people, partly a result of a U.S. government policy adopted in the mid-1950s that encouraged Native people to relocate from rural reservations to cities, including Dallas.
TCU students have embraced the chance to learn what they didn’t in secondary school, said Kernell, who has spoken at numerous symposia and panels. “At all of those events, I have witnessed a hunger,” he said. “I have witnessed a sense of genuineness. I have witnessed honesty that students wanted to know more, and they were intrigued by what they were hearing.”
The Legacy of Village Creek
In recent years, the TCU community has learned about the history of the land where the campus sits today. Until the mid-1830s, the Wichita, Waco, Tawakoni and Keechi, collectively known as the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, lived in a vast area stretching from modern-day Kansas to Central Texas. But in 1838, the Republic of Texas’ second president, Mirabeau Lamar, declared an “exterminating war” against Native people in Texas that would end in their “total extinction or total expulsion.”
One of the battles occurred at Village Creek, near the eastern edge of today’s Fort Worth. On May 24, 1841, Gen. Edward Tarrant led a deadly attack on settlements of Wichita and other Native people that drove them permanently from the area. White settlers moved in and took the land. The state of Texas briefly established reservations for the tribes in the 1850s, but by the end of the decade, the state and U.S. governments had removed them to today’s Oklahoma.
Addison and Randolph Clark’s access to all three sites that TCU has occupied — Thorp Spring, Waco and Fort Worth — was possible only because the Native people who lived there were driven out, Langston writes in an essay included in Being in Relation: Indigenous Peoples, the Land, and Texas Christian University, 1873-2023, published in May by TCU Press.
Today’s Native American Monument was created to acknowledge that history. In 2016, TCU asked leaders in the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes for permission to place the monument and invited them to participate in the design process. The nation today counts just fewer than 4,000 citizens but many more descendants and is headquartered in Anadarko, Oklahoma. The fact that TCU reached out to the nation, said Wichita and Affiliated Tribes President Amber Silverhorn-Wolfe, showed the university was being intentional about recognizing the wrongs of the past.
“If we could go back in time, obviously we wouldn’t want someone taking our homeland and building upon it, and then profiting and not even teaching about us,” she said. “But coming from a positive standpoint, I’m thankful TCU has even thought to have these conversations, and I hope the faculty and administration continue to allow a space for them.”
The monument features the phrase “This ancient land, for all our relations” in both English and Wichita. An additional inscription reads, “We respectfully acknowledge all Native American peoples who have lived on this land since time immemorial. TCU especially acknowledges and pays respect to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes upon whose historical homeland our university is located.”
Through continued collaboration with the Wichita tribal nation, TCU’s Native American Advisory Circle, which includes faculty, staff and students as well as local Native leaders, drafted a land acknowledgment that was adopted by the university in 2021. The statement incorporates the monument’s language as well as the sentence, “TCU acknowledges the many benefits, responsibilities, and relationships of being in this place, which we share with all living beings.”
TCU’s acknowledgment is a model for other entities because the university collaborated with the Wichita tribal nation, said Annette Anderson, a member of the advisory circle and a descendant of Chickasaw and Cherokee people. “TCU came up with one of the best examples of a land acknowledgment; it was driven by the Native people,” she said.
“They met with Native community representatives to write it, and it was not driven by the administration. They really wrote a true story in their land acknowledgment.”
These Things Still Matter
Wendi Sierra, an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, Turtle Clan, taught a course on Native pop culture in spring 2024. “It brought the students a different understanding of Native culture than they had gotten before,” she said.
Hours before daybreak on Oct. 7, the day of the 2024 Native American and Indigenous Peoples Day Symposium, Carl Kurtz ’14 set up his lodge, or tipi, on the grass of the Campus Commons. As the sun rose and students headed to class, some stopped to stare at the 25-foot-tall structure adorned with artwork by Kurtz’s daughter.
Throughout the day, Kurtz, who is Potawatomi, welcomed half a dozen classes to step inside the lodge, which his family uses for ceremonies. He greeted the students in Potawatomi, showed them some of his regalia and opened the floor for questions.
Since the first symposium in 2016, Kurtz has used his lodge as a springboard for conversations about issues affecting Native people. He tells the students that he’s not fluent in Potawatomi because his parents were forbidden from speaking it in their youth and that many Native nations are trying to reclaim their languages.
He encourages his listeners to be thoughtful in their speech: Don’t use the term powwow for a meeting or “going on the warpath” to describe an upset state. He explains why he objects to the use of Indians or Braves as mascots: The words trivialize the identity of an entire group of people.
Kurtz urges his audience to talk about these subjects with their Native classmates and professors and to register for courses about Native topics. To Kurtz, the conversation is part of living out TCU’s mission to educate individuals to think and act as ethical leaders and responsible citizens in the global community. “That’s the purpose of being out there,” he said. “To get them to think … to show them it’s not past tense and that these things still matter.”
TCU students now have more opportunities to take courses incorporating Native content and perspectives. Sierra, who also serves as TCU’s Native American nations and communities liaison, taught a course on Native pop culture in spring 2024. The class was one of her favorites, she said, because it offered a contrast to most people’s limited knowledge of Native communities, which focuses on trauma. Sierra did cover that history in her course, but she said her primary aim was to reveal the resilience and strength of Native culture.
Her students listened to music by Native artists and watched an episode of the Marvel animated series WhatIf…? that features a Mohawk character. Their final project was editing Wikipedia articles on Native actors, musicians and game designers. “It brought the students a different understanding of Native culture than they had gotten before, a contemporary understanding, one that was uplifting and celebratory,” Sierra said. “Then we actually did some good in the world, because we added information to the Wikipedia pages of these people who have earned it and deserve it.”
In fall 2023, Gaul invited one of her graduate classes to write the text for a self-guided campus tour that she described as “a re-seeing of campus features from an Indigenous perspective.”
Since the first Native American and Indigenous Peoples Day Symposium in 2016, Carl Kurtz has used his lodge as a springboard for conversations about issues affecting Native people.
The students, who, like Gaul, are not Native, collaborated with Native advisers, including Anderson, to identify and describe tour stops. These included the monument and the Native American Nations Flags Project displayed in the Mary Couts Burnett Library, as well as natural features such as an old oak tree, the pollinator garden and the statue of the horned frog, which in Diné, or Navajo, culture is called grandfather and considered to have spiritual power that can offer protection and blessing.
“Our culture desperately needs allies,” said Anderson, adding that the Native people in Dallas-Fort Worth who are comfortable leading programs are always stretched thin by Indigenous Peoples Day and Native American Heritage Month. “It’s not like we want people to talk for us, but we want people to share what they’ve learned from us with others.”
Appropriate, Not Appropriating
On a Saturday morning in April 2024, Audrey Turco, a senior political science and youth advocacy and educational studies major, stood in the doorway of a gymnasium on the University of Texas at Arlington campus, bathed in the hot-oil smell of fry bread. She and a friend were taking Sierra’s pop culture course, which required them to attend a powwow.
Although Anderson had given the class a primer on powwow etiquette, Turco still felt out of her element. As she stepped inside the gym, she was acutely aware that she and her friend were the only white people in the room. Even though attending the event was obligatory for her class, she worried that doing so was tantamount to appropriating someone else’s culture.
As the women browsed the vendors’ tables, a man smiled and offered to show them around. His warm welcome dissolved the edge of Turco’s anxiety. Later, when the drums began and dancers entered the circle in a slow, rhythmic shuffle, she settled into her seat and studied the participants’ regalia. Turco and her friend ended up staying at the powwow for close to three hours, much longer than they’d planned.
As long as she was respectful, Turco said, she could attend the powwow and share her experience with other non-Native people without overstepping. “It’s OK to seek interest and engage with another culture that’s different from your own in a way that’s appropriate and not appropriating it.”
TCU is working in other ways to deliver on the promises in its land acknowledgment. It has established the Four Directions Scholars Program, which awards a full scholarship annually to two students who are citizens of a federally recognized tribe.
The university is still “a low-literacy environment” with regard to Native topics, Sierra said. “But it’s changing as we do this work, and even as Native issues get more national visibility.” She points to the success of the television series Reservation Dogs, the film Killers of the Flower Moon and the Marvel comic and television series Echo, which stars a Native character. “As we see things change in that pop cultural landscape, and as we have more activities and offerings on campus, I think that we start to develop that literacy.”
TCU’s Native American and Indigenous Peoples Initiative invites all students to ask questions and learn, recognizing they may not have been exposed to Native cultures or values before, she said.
“For non-Native students, it’s an opportunity to recognize other perspectives, other people, and maybe to think critically about their own perspectives,” she said. “When you learn about another culture, you learn a lot about yourself.”
In the late ’90s, the son of two professors leaves his community in central Mexico for college — and adventure — in Fort Worth. This math nerd with a penchant for public policy and art history accumulates degrees, including a doctorate from Harvard, before channeling his do-gooder instincts into a career with a specialized agency of the United Nations. Schoolchildren worldwide benefit from his efforts.
The tale isn’t the plot of an inspirational novel but the actual life path for Alonso Sánchez ’01, whose background and expertise inform his leadership as a senior economist at the World Bank. His work focuses on educational projects, predominantly in developing countries. He spent the last four years supporting the education sector in West Africa’s Liberia.
Based in Washington, D.C., the World Bank was founded toward the end of World War II with the goal of funding Europe’s recovery. Eight decades later, its mission has evolved into offering assistance in the form of money and technical expertise, primarily to developing nations. The institution’s goals focus on reducing poverty and fostering economic growth in areas including health care, agriculture and education.
As a senior economist specializing in curriculum instruction and learning, Sánchez works with developing nations in the global south on matters relating to education, everything from teacher training to pandemic-related losses in learning.
“I enjoy helping countries figure out their needs, design projects to address them, reassess and reevaluate based on data and lessons learned,” he said. “There is so much need, but also there is much hope. These projects change lives.”
Learning and Doing
Sánchez grew up in Cholula, in Mexico’s Puebla state, curious about the wider world, something he credits in part to his parents. His mother, Mary Alcocer-Berriozábal, was a sociology professor, while his father, Antonio Sánchez-Aguilar, spent 50 years teaching computer science. During his son’s formative years, Sánchez-Aguilar served as an administrator at Universidad de las Américas Puebla, a highly regarded private university that was TCU’s sister school from 1983 to 2008.
“For as long as I can remember, my son has always been interested in learning more,” Sánchez-Aguilar said. “That’s something he does every day at the World Bank.”
At his dad’s suggestion, Sánchez entered TCU as a math major. His sophomore year, he added art history as a second major.
“It was a very contrasting field to my math, but it made me whole,” Sánchez said. He also met his future wife while studying art. Today, he and Annie Laurie (Eddleman) Sánchez ’01 live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with their two young children.
“I had known Alonso when he was growing up and watched him as an undergraduate,” said Larry Adams ’66 MA, professor emeritus of sociology and emeritus associate provost for academic affairs. “He was an all-around student who possessed the abilities and qualities to lead a successful life and all of the characteristics we like to see in a TCU graduate.” Sánchez’s involvement in extracurricular activities and his ability to make friends with students from a range of backgrounds impressed Adams almost as much as Sánchez’s academic abilities.
“What makes Alonso special is his heart for other people,” said Ben Wilkinson ’00, a close friend and former TCU classmate. “Whether he was showing TCU students his home in Cholula, Mexico, who were visiting Universidad de las Américas in Puebla as part of a leadership exchange or working together as resident assistants in Milton Daniel Hall, Alonso always expressed a passion for other people.”
Shortly after their son graduated from TCU, Sánchez’s parents moved to Fort Worth to join the TCU faculty at Adams’ encouragement. Sánchez-Aguilar retired in May after a 21-year career on campus. His wife retired from teaching in TCU’s sociology department a decade earlier.
Alonso Sánchez helps countries design and fund initiatives, from teacher training to pandemic learning recovery, as part of the World Bank’s core mission to reduce poverty and foster economic growth globally.
Their son, meanwhile, proceeded to earn two advanced degrees at the University of Texas at Austin: a Master of Public Affairs and a Master of Arts in Latin American studies. For both degrees, his studies centered on public policy, international development, economics and econometrics.
Sánchez went to work as a consultant with the World Bank to focus on economic and policy analysis in the areas of education and labor markets. He loved the international flavor of Washington, D.C., and relished the position, which allowed him to hone his policy and economics expertise while working in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. He earned a reputation for his strong analytical skills as well as his ability to communicate effectively with people doing the work on the ground.
Craving more knowledge and better tools, he decamped to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spent five years at Harvard University pursuing a Doctor of Education degree. His research centered on the economics of education.
“When I left the World Bank, my manager said hurry up and get your doctorate and come back,” Sánchez said. And though he loved being at the forefront of education policy research in academia, he missed “working with teams, providing advice and working side by side to help countries.”
Back to the Bank
Sánchez returned full time to the World Bank in 2015 as an economist focused on global education. He worked to tailor and secure funding for school-based programs in Cameroon, Nigeria, Lebanon, Honduras and Nicaragua.
To the World Bank’s Alonso Sánchez, it’s elementary: Education is vital to developing countries.
“I’ve worked in places where there was active conflict, but I have also worked in countries that are vast like Mexico, my own country,” he said. “The reality is that if you go into the best public schools in major cities there, you think they’re doing all right, but there is a subsystem of schools in rural, Indigenous communities that are just really forgotten.”
The poorest country he has worked in so far has also been the most challenging and, in many ways, the most rewarding.
Sánchez worked alongside the government of Liberia to support a $47 million grant from the World Bank intended to boost secondary education, particularly for adolescent girls. The West African country, which is slightly smaller geographically than the state of New York, has a population of nearly 5.5 million.
“My role [included] supporting the government’s implementation of the project, which had to do with providing technical assistance, ensuring resources were used effectively in a relevant manner and overall support as the need arose,” he said, emphasizing the World Bank’s role as a partner and funder, while governments and local agencies carry out the actual implementation.
So focused was Sánchez on supporting the Liberian mission to improve education that he left his morning office hours open for years to take calls from Liberian teachers, administrators and government officials. This continued until the project wrapped up at the end of June 2025.
“He took time to listen to concerns of other parties involved, understanding their reservations and addressing them with thoughtfulness and respect,” said Binta Beatrice Massaquoi, a World Bank colleague on Sánchez’s team.
“What makes Alonso a great leader is his ability to combine strategic thinking with genuine empathy and commitment to supporting others,” she said. “His leadership style is built on understanding and valuing the perspective of others.”
Safer Schools
Beyond bolstering classroom outcomes, Liberia has gender-related challenges to address in its schools.
“The environment is not the most welcoming for girls, and one of the most tragic things about Liberia is that they still suffer from a lot of gender-based violence,” Sánchez said. “Everything from gender stereotypes to sex-for-grades or abuse from administrators and teachers is leading girls to drop out.”
At the high school level, only 9 percent of the teachers in Liberia are women. Through the World Bank, Sánchez and his co-workers supported the goal of putting one female guidance counselor in every senior secondary school in the country.
“There is so much need, but also there is much hope.” Alonso Sánchez
The counselors provide academic advice and encouragement to the female student population and serve as a point of contact for reporting abuse allegations.
“What gets me up in the morning,” Sánchez said not long before closing the project, “is the knowledge that I have a seat at the table to work for the children of Liberia, their parents and their communities to better lives through education and safer schools.”
On his frequent trips to West Africa, he could see, feel and hear about the difference the extra support for the female students is making.
“I bring the same sense of adventure I had when I went to TCU to these missions, what the World Bank calls business trips,” he said. “There’s no other way to do this work. You have to go into places, whether it’s a city or a tiny, remote village, and discover how learning is happening and how you can help.
“Yes, you have to have the data, but you have to be able to see it for yourself, too,” said Sánchez, who estimates he spends as much as 20 percent of his time traveling for the World Bank.
In May, he was offered a position with the World Bank in Buenos Aires, where he’ll continue to focus on education projects throughout the region. The family of four made a major life change upon relocating to the Argentine capital at the end of July.
There, as throughout much of the global south, the need to improve educational experiences and outcomes for young learners during this period of economic uncertainty is compounded by the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic still impacting classrooms. But Sánchez can point to measurable victories like those he helped secure in Liberia to maintain his optimism about how change is possible when stakeholders come together with humility and humanity to tackle a singular goal.
“This kind of work, which is very challenging, won’t work if you don’t put yourself in other people’s shoes,” Sánchez said. “You have to understand the politics of the places where we work, but you also have to understand people.”
Shawn Lassiter’s paternal grandfather planted a seed that sprouted into her life path as a community builder. From his farm in Cantonment, Florida, that grandfather, Alfonzo Cottrell, told the story of how he built the family home brick by brick with support from his neighbors.
Lassiter ’24 PhD saw the power of community firsthand when neighbors gathered to take home fresh food from her grandfather’s farm during harvest season. She took to heart how seeds of goodwill could grow into fruits that would reap well-being for the people around her.
In 2021, Lassiter founded BRAVE/R Together, a nonprofit that serves the Fort Worth community in ZIP code 76104, a few miles east of TCU. Her work uplifts people at significant risk of suffering from poor health outcomes. Residents in the ZIP code have the lowest life expectancy in Texas, a 2019 study from UT Southwestern Medical School found.
Lassiter combined her experience as a high school science teacher, education advocacy trainer and doctoral student into becoming chief executive officer of BRAVE/R Together. Through the organization, she helps people in the Southside community thrive by removing barriers to a high-quality education, promoting equitable health care and access to affordable housing, and devising a stronger business and economic development plan for the area.
“I am a habitual dreamer,” she said. “It is almost as if I were a seed, if there were seeds planted in me, and I waited for the opportunity for them to sprout.”
The Shape of a Seedling
During the hot Florida summers of Lassiter’s childhood, her grandmother Martha Cottrell, who worked as a janitor at a local elementary school, would gather discarded workbooks and study materials to bring home. “I would use the books to not only teach myself, but to teach other kids in my neighborhood over the summer,” Lassiter said. “It helped prepare us for the next grade.”
Lassiter’s mother, Kathsya Kirkland, also provided a firm foundation. As the eldest of five, Lassiter worked with her mother to care for her siblings. “I have always felt I had a responsibility, that I was like my mom’s co-pilot,” she said. “I do not have this individual sense of responsibility; I have a collective sense of responsibility. It’s the oldest child in me.”
“Shawn has always been focused,” said her father, Calvin Cottrell. “And once she sets her mind on something, she will do it.”
As an academically astute teen, Lassiter said, she knew she wanted to be the first in her family to go to college. At Alabama State University, she studied biology, a decision that shaped her trajectory. She said her time at the historically Black college in Montgomery made her into the leader and person she is today. Lessons of community, culture and collective impact from Alabama State are carried out in her work.
She next pursued a Master of Public Administration with an emphasis in urban planning from Ashford University’s Forbes School of Business.
Lassiter moved to Fort Worth in 2012 to teach science at Paschal High School, a few blocks east of TCU. Over the next decade, as she learned of the challenges in 76104, including disparaging narratives and deadly health outcomes, she decided to act. “I knew the work needed to happen here,” she said, “because this is where the need was the greatest.”
Shawn Lassiter guides BRAVE/R Together in preserving the Southside’s rich history while fostering economic and educational growth for residents.
The Historic Southside and Morningside neighborhoods in Fort Worth have a vibrant history stretching back to the early 20th century. Johnny Lewis, an Air Force veteran, first made the neighborhood home more than 50 years ago. He described the 1970s, when he and his fellow airmen would walk down Evans Avenue and visit popular gathering spaces, including the Flamingo, to hear the sultry sounds of jazz and blues musicians like Flo and James Ray.
Back then, he said, he could always count on a delectable meal enjoyed alongside neighbors because famed chefs such as Louise Smith worked in the area. “The Southside was a special place that had everything we needed, from doctors to theaters to lounges to the best barbecue … and people who cared for one another.”
His wife, Shirley Lewis, worked to ensure that history would be preserved for future generations. The Black history markers she advocated for are etched in stone along Evans Plaza, the outdoor hub of the community. At nearby Ella Shamblee Library, flooring symbolizing the Niger River is below one-of-a-kind works from world-class artist and Fort Worth resident Letitia Huckaby.
Shirley Lewis died in 2018 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Johnny Lewis said his wife’s community revitalization efforts paved the way for leaders such as Lassiter to continue and build upon that work — which is as important today as it ever has been.
Today’s Evans Avenue is a shell of the vibrant culture that once thrived on both sides of the street. Numerous for-sale signs hang in front of buildings like the Brooks Clinic, which once was the center of preventive care for generations of Black families.
Tilling the Soil
Lassiter decided Southside needed the kind of community building she had discovered in her childhood. Nine years after arriving in Fort Worth and while working toward a doctorate at TCU’s College of Education, she launched BRAVE/R Together, with a mission to engage stakeholders and align resources for residents of 76104 to improve outcomes through education, health care, housing and economic development.
The premise of BRAVE/R Together is that the work of community development and revitalization cannot happen in a vacuum but must happen with the community at the helm, Lassiter said. “Community is health.”
In summer 2021, after an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Lassiter used her passion to fuel her new endeavor. She gathered Southside community leaders at the Shamblee Library to ask how they perceived leadership in the community and who the leaders were, which helped her launch the first initiative, the Community Ambassador Program.
Educators, youth leaders, community organizers and small-business owners, all who live, work, grew up or own a business in 76104, came together as ambassadors. Their first act was to host roundtables centered on education, health care, housing and business. These robust dialogues with the community not only upheld the history of the area but cast hope for the future.
That work continues to expand.
Lassiter now spends her days as the leader of BRAVE/R Together working alongside the community, ensuring small-business owners have access to capital and networks, building a high-quality learning environment for children and educators, promoting health care and wellness for vulnerable people, and restoring a thriving neighborhood that residents can call home for generations to come.
Driving substantive, enduring change is no small feat, but Cottrell said his daughter is up to the task. “She has never had a problem dreaming big and going after it.”
The Opportunity to Grow
Lassiter’s vision is for residents, visitors and neighbors to drive down Evans Avenue and see an oasis of resources, small businesses, cultural and artistic expressions, and a reminder that the people are the heartbeat of Southside.
BRAVE/R Together has raised and reinvested nearly $800,000 in its Community Grants Program, which has supported nearly 20 grassroots nonprofits. Funds have supported organizations such as the Kids Environmental Education Network, which provides children with a chance to grow an affinity for nature, and the Lenora Rolla Heritage Center, which features programming designed to preserve the history of Black people in Tarrant County. BRAVE/R also empowers efforts in neighborhood schools such as Van Zandt Guinn Elementary and Morningside Middle School to provide students access to basic needs.
The BRAVE/R Business Academy has served more than 100 small-business owners, providing them with financial and technical assistance to attain minority business certifications, connecting them with bank representatives to learn about accessing capital and leading classes in marketing.
Lassiter said she envisions academy members filling empty storefronts and grantees providing services from new community workspaces in the neighborhood.
Angela Rainey, a lifelong advocate and ambassador for the Southside neighborhood, said Lassiter is “galvanizing the residents in a way that allows them to have a voice and agency in rebuilding our community. BRAVE/R Together ensures that everyone has a seat at the table, from the elders to the youth.”
The efforts are starting to bear fruit.
The city of Fort Worth is supporting funding for the Evans & Rosedale Urban Village mixed-use development project, which will bring new residential facilities, retail and parking to the area. The National Juneteenth Museum plans to open at the corner of those two streets in the next few years. BRAVE/R Together is on the ground to ensure that community voices are heard and valued as the development proceeds.
“I want to stand here 20 years from now knowing that the investments and sacrifices we made today made a difference for generations to come.” Shawn Lassiter
Meanwhile, businesses like Smoke-a-holics BBQ and Stephanie’s Jamaican Kitchen are bringing traffic and life back to Southside. Johnny Lewis ventured out to Evans Plaza on a cool November day to attend the Phoenix Festival, hosted by BRAVE/R Together. Camera in tow, he listened to local artists and enjoyed cuisine from small businesses empowered by the BRAVE/R Business Academy.
Lewis said these moments give him hope for the future of the neighborhood. “I am extremely proud of the work of BRAVE/R Together, and I know that Shirley would be too. Watching Shawn with her education, knowledge of resources and understanding of bringing the right people together brings me joy.”
Lassiter said the relentless focus on improving the future is fueled by her own children, Christian, Chance and Destiny. “They are my priority. The work and dreams are centered around them.”
Due to witnessing the benefits of harvest season back on her grandparents’ family farm in Florida, she knows that if she continues to till the soil, harvest season is on the horizon for the Southside.
“I want to stand here 20 years from now,” she said, “knowing that the investments and sacrifices we made today made a difference for generations to come.”
Charity Robinson knows she’s not supposed to play favorites. The instructor of film, television and digital media in the Bob Schieffer College of Communication doesn’t pick favorite students or a favorite child. But she confesses to having a favorite class: Documentary Production.
Launched by Robinson in 2016, the class partners students with a Fort Worth-based organization to tell its story in a documentary film that doubles as a service-learning project.
The featured organizations have been dedicated to everything from improving community-police relations to supporting first-generation students to, in the film Underdawgs, empowering individuals with intellectual differences to achieve independence through meaningful employment. Underdawgs tells the inspiring story of Austin Underwood, a man with Down syndrome who runs a hot dog food truck with his family, and how he lives a life of expectations, not limitations.
From the film “Underdawgs,” Austin Underwood, a man with Down syndrome, serves customers at his hot dog food truck. The student-produced documentary showcases a life built on expectations, not limitations, highlighting the power of meaningful employment and community support. Courtesy of Charity Robinson
Student productions have won prizes at film festivals, aired on Texas public television stations and earned national acclaim from the Broadcast Education Association. Underdawgs was shown at the National Down Syndrome Congress convention.
Everyone wins, Robinson said. “I not only see the students growing in their filmmaking careers and honing their professional skills, but they also tap into a new skill set, which is becoming an advocate for an important cause in the community.”
Lead Time
Kate Schein, a junior film, television and digital media major, said the Documentary Production course was a perfect fit for her interests and career goals. She started making documentaries in eighth grade and interned with So Fare Films in Rome, where she shot footage around the city and wrote scripts for a docuseries. “I’m passionate about telling real stories and advocating for issues that matter to me,” Schein said. “This class provides a one-of-a-kind opportunity to do just that.”
Before enrolling, students in this upper-level elective have already completed a three-course sequence on film and television production, so they’ve acquired the requisite skills to create a documentary. When the semester starts, they apply for a team role that aligns with their career goals.
There are five leadership roles: director, producer, director of photography, editing lead, and writing and research lead. The remaining students — the class is capped at 12 — staff those teams and the design and marketing team.
“These students are close to graduation,” Robinson said. “This is an opportunity to have industry-relevant experience on their résumé.”
From left, Carson Scott, Jackson James, Dayne Love and Krystal Guerra (background right) work together to create student-produced films in TCU’s Documentary Production class. Photo by Joyce Marshall.
Partners with Purpose
Robinson selects a local organization based on three criteria: Does this organization have the financial means or resources to make a production of this level on its own? Is the subject one Robinson is passionate about? Will the subject resonate with the students? “The work that’s required is above and beyond what a typical workload would be,” she said. “When you’re passionate about something, you’re willing to put more attention and time into it.”
Robinson finds many subjects through word-of-mouth referrals. For Underdawgs, though, she had a personal connection: She has a daughter with intellectual differences who participates in a special education program that the Underwood family was instrumental in establishing.
Class films have included 76105: Dr. King Won’t Rise, which addresses how residents in the Stop Six neighborhood in southeast Fort Worth serve their community by volunteering at local schools, conducting regular clean-ups and working with law enforcement to bolster police relations.
Beloved highlights a grieving mother who becomes an advocate by creating Project Beloved after her daughter’s death. The nonprofit organization provides support to sexual assault survivors across the country and successfully lobbied for Texas legislation that strengthens police reporting requirements for rape cases.
“I was blown away by the TCU students,” said Tracy Matheson, founder of Project Beloved. Her daughter, Molly, 22, was raped and strangled in 2017. “They were so engaged. They had done their research. Their level of professionalism and their commitment to doing their work well were genuine.”
Last spring’s class partnered with the nonprofit Create + Collaborate, which provides opportunities for students transitioning into young adulthood — particularly first-generation college students — through mentoring and leadership training to promote academic, personal and career success.
Students in the spring 2025 Documentary Production course work on “Trailblazers: The Create + Collaborate Story.” This unique service-learning class empowers them to tell compelling stories for local nonprofits, honing filmmaking skills while advocating for vital community causes. Photo by Joyce Marshall
Collaboration is Key
Succeeding in the documentary production class distills down to one word: teamwork. “A lot of students haven’t worked in a team on a project of this caliber,” Robinson said. “Everybody has to pull their weight, or it doesn’t come together.”
Each group must define and achieve its milestones in coordination with the other groups. They’re as intricately interconnected as watch gears, with everyone, always, keeping the momentum going.
For example, the information compiled by the research and writing team enables the director and photography team to develop a shot list. They must capture not only interviews and reenacted scenes but also “B-roll,” additional images that will enhance the storytelling, such as the touching Matheson family home videos included in Beloved.
“With a scripted film, you can literally manufacture anything you want,” said Jonathan Stokx ’25, director of Trailblazers: The Create + Collaborate Story, the spring 2025 project scheduled for release in November. “But documentary is real. You have to see how you can best capture the moment rather than manufacture it.”
The editing team selects footage that creates a compelling visual storyline. For Underdawgs, students included childhood images of Austin wearing a Superman T-shirt and running a race in grade school as well as new scenes of him serving customers at his food truck, walking to his job at Campisi’s restaurant and proposing to his girlfriend, Jenny. “My favorite scenes,” Underwood said, “show how I am independent.”
Students highlight their peers’ successes through the “Doc Star of the Week” award. Photo by Joyce Marshall
The design and marketing team uses those visuals to create posters and press kits and place the documentary on FilmFreeway, where filmmakers connect with festivals.
As producer of Trailblazers, Schein was the main contact with the partner organization and the liaison between all team members. “It’s exciting to support everyone in whatever ways they need,” she said, “while also being the one making everything happen logistically.”
Every year, there’s a bottleneck during Week 8, Robinson said. That’s around semester break, when the team is just starting the writing process and hasn’t yet seen any footage, so it’s hard to envision what the film will look like. “The students come to me and ask, ‘How in the world are we ever going to make this happen?’ ”
To build teamwork, production meetings include an icebreaker, such as a round of trivia, as a team-building exercise. In last spring’s classes, the students also voted on a “Doc Star of the Week” to celebrate team members.
Robinson’s nurturing yet empowering nature has made her a favorite instructor of students and alumni of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication. “What stands out the most about Charity is the trust she places in her students,” Schein said. “She is there to guide us every step of the way, but she also gives us the freedom to take the reins and create something that is truly ours.”
Starting the Conversation
Each documentary premieres to a packed house on campus, followed by a community discussion.
One goal of the class is that the conversation about these important causes doesn’t end with the documentary. The featured organizations continue to use the films to share their missions. 76105: Dr. King Won’t Rise was screened at the Fort Worth Martin Luther King Jr. Parade. Underdawgs screened at four film festivals and aired on PBS stations across Texas. Beloved won best documentary at the Panther City Film Festival and is shown by Project Beloved to volunteer groups assembling Beloved Bundles, care packages for sexual assault survivors. “The film will be shown again and again and again,” Matheson said, “because it’s an easy way to open the door to really hard conversations.”
The high quality of the student-produced films earned TCU recognition as a top documentary program from the Broadcast Education Association in 2023 and 2024. “That recognition is incredible, because this program is something I am incredibly passionate about,” Robinson said. “I’m thankful that the hard work of these students has been recognized.”
Students captured the heart of Fort Worth’s Stop Six neighborhood for the film “76105: Dr. King Won’t Rise.” Courtesy of Charity Robinson
That reputation attracts even more students to the Documentary Production class, and it benefits alumni seeking careers in the field, such as Noelle Siwek ’24, the producer of Underdawgs.
“The class totally changed the direction of my career path,” said Siwek, who is working as a freelancer for several production companies. “I’m passionate about pursuing a career in documentary production because of the stories that get to be told there. I believe filmmaking is a gift, and it is to be used to inspire and instill hope in things worth believing in.”
WHY IS ATHLETICS ONE OF THE FOUR PILLARS OF TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY’S LEAD ON: VALUES IN ACTION STRATEGIC PLAN FOR THE FUTURE? Sports have been absolutely catalytic in propelling TCU from a respected regional university onto the national stage as a top-tier institution.
Horned Frogs athletics act as our “front porch,” helping draw talented students from all corners of the globe right here to Fort Worth. And with athletics director Mike Buddie — whose proven success aligns perfectly with our values — at the helm, we are taking the reins of leadership in the shifting world of college sports.
The energy and shared experience surrounding our programs forge deep, lasting connections among students and extend to our alumni, faculty, staff and broader community members. Our vision is to be a true destination for student-athletes who seek elite competition while being members of a university community that genuinely values their holistic development as athletes, as scholars and as engaged citizens.
Athletics aren’t just about winning games; they are about building our brand, attracting top talent, fostering community and strengthening our ties for decades to come.
Michael Sherrod ’10 EMBA, the William M. Dickey Entrepreneur in Residence at the Neeley School of Business, has founded or held senior management roles at dozens of companies, including AOL Local and Ancestry.com.
His diverse professional experiences inform his teaching across campus, including graduate-levelclasses inthe business analytics, business administration and liberal arts programs, and serving as a faculty member in theBNSF Neeley Leadership Program, which trains business students to become industry leaders. Sherrod also directs TCU’s Innovative Teachers Guild, where non-business professors learn to use entrepreneurial thinking and experiential learning in their classrooms.
What brought you to TCU, and what keeps you here?
I had just finished being the first publisher of the Texas Tribune down in Austin. I came back to Fort Worth, and I thoughtit was about time to retire. I got a call from a former EMBA professor that I had in 2010 who told me that TCU was looking for an entrepreneur in residence. I thought, “Well, that sounds interesting.”
Normally speaking, those are one-year gigs — you write a book, you teach a class. When I got there for the interview, they said, “We’d like for you to stay as long as you like.” I thought it’d last for a few years, but it’ll be 14 years that I’ve been there, and what made me stay was the incredibly wonderful students and the people who work there.
It was a revelation to me when I taught my first semester-long class. That was way harder than I thought it was going to be — putting together all the content for a whole semester and making sure it’s not too much and not too little, sort of a Goldilocks situation. You want to make it just right. My wife — she’s a PhD and she taught in the nursing school for 20 years — she helped me understand how to do that, which was invaluable.
Once I taught that first semester, I was hooked. I just loved it. Teaching was something I found to be just totally engaging, impactful, a lot of fun and really, really interesting. I learned from the students I think as much as I taught them, and the students at TCU have changed dramatically since I started in 2011. They’re very engaged and wanting to get in there and grind away. What people say about Gen Z I just don’t see. I see a lot of engaged students with a fantastic work ethic. I have been at TCU longer than I have ever been at any other workplace and it’s because I love it.
What do you want students to take away from your courses?
In corporate entrepreneurship, I want them to learn big concepts around how to manage people because one of the things that happens to our students when they graduate is they very quickly become managers. The reason 75 percent of people quit their jobs in the Great Resignation was because of their immediate supervisor, so what I’m trying to get them to understand is how corporate cultures work and how they can leverage that for their own success.
It’s my firm belief that in the 21st century, every single student at TCU at some point will have to be an entrepreneur. There’s just too much volatility in corporations. No one has a 30-year career anymore. So they’re going to have many, many different kinds of jobs. And they need to be flexible. They need to be continuously learning. They need to be adaptable.
Most importantly, they need to understand basic technology that’s coming into the world. If people are doing those things and you don’t understand them, you can’t effectively manage them because you don’t know enough. They could say, “This project is going to take six months,” when, in reality, it should take six weeks, and if you don’t know that you’re not going to do well in your job. So that’s really what I’m trying to get across to them — the things they need to understand to be successful.
What do you want to learn from students?
Mostly what I want to learn from students is what are they thinking right now? What is it that they are interested in? It changes — in the time I’ve been there, students went from kind of being, “Yeah, I’m just going to be a corporate cog and I want a job,” to being very activist in their approach. Now, “I don’t just want a job. I want a job that meets my standards, that allows me to be who I am, my authentic self.” And I love seeing that.
What do you find rewarding about working with students?
Just getting to know them is rewarding. Most of them are just a hoot. I really like to get to know them a little bit and understand not only where they’re coming frombut, more importantly, where they want to go. One of the very first questions I ask in all of my classes is, “Why did you take this class? How does this fit into your overall goals for your career?”
Michael Sherrod challenges students and faculty to embrace uncertainty, think entrepreneurially and create a human-centered future. Photo by Glen E. Ellman
You’ve received several teaching awards, including a 2024 Poets&Quants Best Undergraduate Business Professor nod. What does it mean to receive those honors?
I love the fact that Poets&Quants recognized me as one of their top professors. I got the TCUGraduate Teaching award a few years back, and even before that, I got an Innovative Curriculum Award. Those things mean a lot to me, and I’m very proud of them. But really, when I get a note from a student or a student sees me in the hall and says, “I had your course last semester. I really enjoyed it. I miss being in that class,” that’s what really makes me feel like I’m doing something impactful.
What can you share about your current projects?
The thing I’m most interested in advancing right now is the Innovative Teachers Guild. I want to change that up a little bit, so that instead of just talking about and mentoring them on entrepreneurial thinking and experiential learning, they have to produce a business or a course or a module that’s going to help their students right now and post-graduation. The curriculum around that is what I’m working on right now because I think that could be something that not only we could use here at TCU, but we could export to other universities to help their professors get more engaged.
What does innovation mean to you?
Innovation, to me, means understanding what it takes to create the future. And the reason this is so important to me is because I believe that if all of us aren’t working to create a human-centered future, we won’t have one. We’ll have a machine-centered future, and that is not good for humanity.
The digital landscape has changed a lot in the past 10 to 15 years. What are the challenges of keeping up?
Man, you’ve got to work at that. If you want to keep up with what’s happening right now, youhave to spend a good amount of time every day going through all of the sites that you trust, looking for new things, scouring the net for new information. What’s the newest thing in AI? What’s happening in blockchain? What’s going on in crypto, what’s happening in cyber security?
Every day, something new comes out, some new capability. Just last week, agents could do one thing at a time. This week, they can do 50 simultaneously because of Manus, a Chinese AI that can do 50 simultaneous activities as an agent. That is a game-changer.
I encourage everyone to take all the free courses that are out there on AI, because you are going to have an AI assistant. It doesn’t matter what your age is or what your job is, you need to be learning AI because it’s going to become part and parcel of your life faster than you think.
Whichbig lesson have you learned in your career, and how have you passed that on to your students?
I think the most important lesson that I can give them is if you’ve got a really great idea that you’ve been working on for a long time and you present that idea to management and they say no, you have a choice to make. You either stay and you go on and do your job, or you take that idea and you leave and you create something new with it.
So they’re going to have that moment in their career, maybe a couple of times, where they have to decide, “Is this the time for me to go do this, or am I going to stay inside the corporation?” And the difficulty in that decision is that corporations are no longer safe. The risk of losing your job in a corporate environment is exactly the same as starting a small business: 50 percent over four years. So there’s no more advantage to going to work and getting a paycheck than there is trying to do your own thing.
“Once I taught that first semester, I was hooked. I just loved it. Teaching was something I found to be just totally engaging, impactful, a lot of fun and really, really interesting.” Michael Sherrod
You manageBlack Dove Press and Blue Pigeon Press, both smallbook publishing companies. What kind of books do you publish and what are you reading right now?
I publish poetry books, fantasy novels, interesting biographical sketches. I do some experimental publishing, like I published a book of QR codes that every month changed to a new book at midnight at the end of the month. I’ll publish anything that interests me.
I’m reading a book by Kurt Vonnegut right now, an old one, Breakfast of Champions, which is one of my favorite books. I’m actually rereading it for about the 15th time. I’m a big science fiction reader, and my favorite books right now are The Murderbots Diaries. They are hilarious.
I always have at least one print book and one digital book that I’m reading. I read about 120 books a year. That’s one of the ways I keep up with what’s going on in the world. This is weird, but I’m a huge fan of Norwegian and Japanese detective novels — Chinese, too. They are reallyinteresting, different and the whole north part of Europe has really dark detectives.
Is there a professional achievement that you’re most proud of?
Starting my first company, Sherrod Publishing, Inc. That and Digital City [a company Sherrod co-founded that provided the first digitized city guide]. The reason I’m proud of Digital City is because when we started that company no one had ever really worked for a website before, so finding people to work there was very difficult. And not only that, but the salaries we had to pay were tiny.
So I found people who had just gotten out of mental institutions, that had cocaine problems, that were afraid to drive. My editor was 6-foot-7, weighed 450 pounds and wore a purple suit every day. So it was an unusual group of people. But what I’m proudest of is that group of people, they all had problems in their background and they were determined in this new industry to remake themselves. We made more money and we had eight times the users of any other Digital City because these people were brilliant.
I’m proud of my first company [Sherrod Publishing, Inc., which began as a magazine publishing company] because it actually worked when I didn’t know anything. I was lucky, lucky, lucky, but I was able to take that luck and make it work. Digital City was my other favorite because it created such opportunity for these people. Most of the people who were on the original team at Digital City have all gone on to do great things and are part of my network still to this day.
Editor’s Note: The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
