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C.A. Roberson
1990 Distinguished Alumnus |
1990 Homecoming festivities Saturday, October 27, will spotlight the Chancellor of Tarrant
County Junior College District. C. A. Roberson, a 1948 graduate of San Angelo College, will be honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award by Angelo State University's Ex-Students Association. He will be a featured guest, along with the Retired Faculty Member of the Year, at the annual Ex-Students Luncheon at 11:30 a.m. in the Houston Harte University Center Ballroom and will be recognized at halftime during the Angelo State-Cameron, Oklahoma, football game that night.
A Tom Green County native, Roberson graduated from San Angelo High School in 1946 and then attended San Angelo College in the "old building" across from the high school. He recalled moving onto the new campus in the fall of 1947 while it was still under construction and sitting in an English class when a brick fell through the window as workers were laying bricks right above them.
Two faculty members really stand out in my memory," said Roberson, "and both had been there since the college opened-Ralph Masterson, who taught business-taught me my first accounting class-and Leslie Bare, who taught physics. We had an excellent faculty and had a student body that really wanted to succeed. There wasn't a lot of fooling around. The war was over and everybody was ready to get on with it."
Roberson was in the first graduating class on the new campus in the spring of 1948. He then went to Texas Tech, where he received a B.B.A. in 1950 and an M.B.A. in 1951. In 1951, he returned to San Angelo College as business manager.
Roberson joked about his first job with SAC. "That was something of a strange situtation, being an administrator with all those faculty members who knew me and knew I was such a lousy student," mused Roberson. "But it wasn't a difficult situation. We were a very close-knit group."
With an enrollment of about 1,200 students, Roberson remembered that the budget for the entire college was about $250,000 the first year he was business manager.
While working at SAC, he met his wife, Shirley (Stevens), and they were eventually married in 1957. She graduated from San Angelo College in 1949, finished college at Southwest Texas State, and was teaching special education in the San Angelo schools when they met. They have four children and three grandchildren.
In 1954-55, he did graduate work in junior college administration at the University of Texas at Austin. He was dean of students at Sul Ross State University from 1955 to 1960 and business manager at Odessa College from 1960 to 1966.
On September 15, 1988, C. A. Roberson was named by the Board of Trustees of the Tarrant County Junior College District to succeed founding Chancellor Joe B. Rushing. Roberson became TCJC's second chief executive officer February 1, 1989, after more than 21 years as executive vice chancellor.
As chancellor, Roberson oversees the operation of a college that, with a fall 1989 enrollment of 27,109, is the third-largest community college and the sixth-largest institution of higher education in Texas. At its three comprehensive campuses, TCJC offers more than 50 occupational programs.
In addition to working in higher education for the last 39 years, Roberson has served on numerous state boards, commissions, and committees. He has been named to one state board or another by every governor of Texas since 1953. The two he mentions most often are the Coordinating Board's Higher Educaton Insurance Administrative Council, of which he is the only founding member still serving, and the Board of Trustees of the Texas Teacher Retirement System, charged with the investments of about $20 billion from a membership that includes 500,000 active and 100,000 retired educators. Roberson is currently in his second six-year term on the TRS board.
As profiled in the 1990 Fall Alumni Magazine.
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