Tenure-Track: Assistant Professor in Agriculture and Rural Community Leadership

College Station, TX

10/12/2026

191929

The Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications (ALEC) and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University invite applications for a full-time, 9-month Assistant Professor faculty position (tenure-track) with academic, scholarly, and faculty accomplishments in Agricultural and Rural Community Leadership. The anticipated start date for this opportunity is January 1, 2028.

The successful candidate will contribute to the continued growth of the ALEC academic programs, specifically the Agricultural Leadership (ALED) degree and the M.S. and Ph.D. degree programs in Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications. The position carries a Division of Effort of 50% research, 40% teaching, and 10% service. The individual in this position is expected to obtain federal, state, industrial, and/or foundation funding to support and sustain a vigorous research program.

Texas is simultaneously one of the most agriculturally productive and most unevenly developed states in the nation. It leads the country in cattle, cotton, hay, sheep, wool, goats, mohair, and horse production and ranks among the top ten producers for more than 40 major commodities. Yet the communities that anchor this agricultural economy face compounding pressures: a rural population of more than three million people who routinely struggle to access healthcare, broadband, education, and economic opportunity that urban counterparts take for granted.

At least 74 Texas counties lack a hospital, 20 or more rural hospitals have closed since 2010, and nearly one million rural Texans lack adequate broadband connectivity, costing the state more than $5 billion in lost economic potential annually.

This position is designed to advance scholarship at the critical intersection of agriculture and rural community leadership
development
, recognizing that the strength of Texas’s commodity sectors and the vitality of its rural communities are deeply interdependent. Without capable local leaders navigating disruption, small towns and farm-dependent counties face decline; without thriving rural communities, the infrastructure, labor, and social capital that sustains commodity agriculture erodes.

The successful candidate will build a nationally recognized, externally funded research program examining how leaders of Texas’s agricultural commodity industries and rural communities are developed, prepared, and empowered to meet the challenges of 2030 and beyond.

Research (50%)

The successful candidate will:

• Develop and lead a vigorous, externally funded research program at the intersection of agriculture and rural community leadership development
  , with specific relevance to Texas’s agricultural commodity sectors and rural communities.
• Investigate leadership formation, capacity building, and organizational effectiveness within Texas agricultural commodity industries, such as beef cattle, cotton, corn, sorghum, poultry, dairy, sheep, goat, and specialty crop sectors.
• Pursue research on rural community leadership challenges facing Texas, such as community capacity building in farm-dependent counties; youth out migration and succession of rural leadership; civic leadership development in small towns; rural economic diversification and entrepreneurship; and the leadership dimensions of rural health, broadband access, water systems, and infrastructure.
• Examine the intersections between commodity industry leadership and rural community wellbeing, including the roles of commodity organizations, producer cooperatives, and…