Texas president Jay Hartzell, one of the key figures in the Longhorns’ move to the Southeastern Conference, will be the president at SMU, the schools announced Tuesday.
SMU’s board of trustees unanimously voted Tuesday to name Hartzell as the successor to R. Gerald Turner, who has been SMU’s president since 1995 and will transition to President Emeritus. Hartzell will take over at SMU on June 1.
Hartzell has been Texas’ president since September 2020 and part of a power trio, along with UT’s system board of regents chairman Kevin Eltife and Longhorns athletic director Chris Del Conte, who charted the school’s move to the SEC. Hartzell began having conversations with his counterpart at Oklahoma, Joe Harroz, in the fall of 2020 about the evolution of college sports and their universities’ place in it.
They explored leaving the Big 12, which they were charter members of in 1996, and initiated contact with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey in the spring of 2021. Texas and Oklahoma officially announced their move to the SEC in July 2021 and played their first football season in the league in 2024.
In a letter to the Longhorn community, Hartzell thanked Eltife, noted the school’s academic accomplishments under his watch and mentioned the Longhorns’ 11 NCAA national championships and three Directors’ Cups, which are annually awarded to the athletic program with the most on-field success across the entire department.
Hartzell, Eltife and Del Conte also spearheaded the football program’s most consequential coaching change in the post-Mack Brown era, firing Tom Herman and hiring Steve Sarkisian in January 2021. Sarkisian, a former coach at Washington and USC, worked as Alabama’s offensive coordinator when the Longhorns hired him and had helped the Crimson Tide to a national title behind a record-setting offense.
Sarkisian is 38-16 in four seasons at Texas, taking the Longhorns to consecutive College Football Playoff appearances. They won the Big 12 championship in 2023, played for the SEC title in 2024 and meet Ohio State on Friday in the Playoff semifinal at the Cotton Bowl. That success comes after the Longhorns largely struggled after Brown was pushed out following the 2013 season. Texas went 41-36 in the six seasons before Hartzell’s presidential tenure began.
The restoration of Texas football into college football’s elite has also been, in part, the result of the administrative alignment between Hartzell, Eltife and Del Conte. “United Texas is a reckoning,” Del Conte said last summer after the school hired Texas A&M baseball coach Jim Schlossnagle. Del Conte has often remarked how the synergy between the three of them, led by Hartzell, enabled Texas athletics to thrive.
Early in his tenure, Hartzell also commissioned a 24-person committee to study the origins of Texas’ school song, “The Eyes of Texas,” after a group of Texas football players took exception to the song and its origins in the summer of 2020. The committee produced a 58-page report that concluded that the song “most probably” debuted in a racist setting at a minstrel show in 1903 but did not have racist intent.
The debate around the song and whether players had to stand to sing it after games engulfed the campus during Hartzell’s tenure as interim president and his initial months on the job. After Sarkisian’s hiring, the coach declared “‘The Eyes of Texas’ is our school song … We support that song, we’re gonna sing that song and we’re gonna sing it proudly.” Sarkisian apologized for leaving the field after a 2022 loss to Oklahoma State before singing the song, but since then the issue has faded from public discourse surrounding the football team.
Hartzell was Texas’ 30th president and got his Ph.D. in finance from UT. He joined the school in 2001 and served in various capacities before becoming president, including serving as the dean of the prestigious McCombs School of Business.
“I will be eternally grateful for my 29 years at UT as a student, faculty member, and administrator,” Hartzell said in his letter. “My wife, Kara, and I will always be Longhorns — as alumni, parents, passionate supporters, and fans — even when we are no longer on the faculty or staff.”
Hartzell arrives at SMU as it has also rediscovered success on the gridiron following a major conference move. After joining the ACC in 2024, SMU football reached its highest ranking in the Associated Press poll since 1985, played for the ACC championship and made the College Football Playoff. The Mustangs are 22-6 in the last two seasons.
(Photo: Sara Diggins / American-Statesman / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
