When Jeff Savell enrolled in his first class at Texas A&M University in 1972, the Ferris, Texas, native didn’t plan to earn his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in animal science there and then spend his entire career in College Station. He felt the spark of the Texas Aggie spirit early in life and it still glows brightly in him decades later. It was fitting, then, that this past June, the University Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor and E.M. “Manny” Rosenthal Chairholder in the university’s Department of Animal Science, was appointed by the Board of Regents as the new vice chancellor and dean for Agriculture and Life Sciences of Texas A&M AgriLife, 50 years after he enrolled in that first class.

With deep family roots in Texas and generations before him working in cotton production, Savell, who is now 68 years old, said that a career in some facet of agriculture for him was inevitable, and through that pursuit, a lifelong commitment to Texas A&M University and the Aggie community.

Especially after his father died when he was 15 years old, Savell leaned into activities related to Future Farmers of America (FFA) including livestock showing and judging. He was inspired to move in that direction largely because of the influence of his agriculture science teacher at Ferris High School, M.S. Hammack, a 1937 graduate of Texas A&M and a dyed-in-the-wool Aggie.

“I think that set me on the path for what would eventually be success that I didn’t even know at the time,” said Savell. “It kept me on the straight and narrow.”

It was “Mr. Hammack” who first gave Savell and the rest of his freshmen classmates their first glimpse of Aggieland during a visit to the College Station campus to take part in a series of livestock and meat judging workshops.

“There was this mystique about Texas A&M and these people,” Savell said. “My ag teacher was always introducing us to everybody, and all the faculty members you’d see there would all have like beautiful silver belly hats on and a coat with a tie, good-looking boots; they were just the stockmen of that time,” he said.

Before enrolling at A&M, Savell first attended Tarleton State University for a year on a scholarship ($50 per semester) earned from early success in livestock judging during high school. But his eye was still on the prize of being a Texas Aggie. During other visits to the campus before attending A&M, he remembered well his first brush with the greatness that was Gary Smith, PhD, who was a celebrated professor there from 1969 to 1982 and went on to be the head of A&M’s Department of Animal Science from 1982 to 1990. To many students and colleagues, Smith is known affectionately as the ‘dean’ of meat scientists. Savell said he was also starstruck in those days by other faculty members like Zerle Carpenter, PhD, who later was the Department of Animal Science head and went on to lead what is now the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service for the Texas A&M University System. Savell said there was an unmistakable aura about people like Smith and Carpenter that inspired him.

“I just remember seeing those guys at the meat lab because you’d go over to the meat lab to judge meat and they would be the ones bringing the carcasses to the classroom or the cuts of meat with their students and I’d go, ‘Man, this is fantastic stuff.’”

From left, meat scientists Zerle Carpenter, Gary Smith, Thayne Dutson and Jeff Savell receiving team research award for electrical stimulation from Deputy Chancellor Perry Adkisson. (Texas A&M AgriLife)

 

Aggie in training

Savell’s first semester as an Aggie officially began in the fall semester of 1972, when enrollment was a modest 16,000 (compared to about 70,000 in 2022). In the spring semester he enrolled in Animal Science 307, instructed by the one-and-only Dr. Gary Smith. He said taking that class taught by a world-class instructor was affirmation of his educational path. It was Smith that added fuel to the fire simmering in Savell’s belly. He said Smith is part of a very small fraternity of faculty members that he considers to be masters of teaching.

“Once I took his course in 1973, I was in love with the meat science field,” Savell said.

In his second year at A&M, Savell took a meat judging class and made the meat judging team, which was very successful in its competitions. Up until then Savell planned to receive an undergraduate degree and become a county extension agent, which was a role he worked in early in his career. After being exposed to meat judging though, his vision shifted and after graduating with a degree in animal science, he planned to work for a meat-processing company.

During the process, he became a student worker with the department and got to know some of the graduate students. After hearing about their pursuits, the prospect of going to graduate school piqued Savell’s interest. He talked about the possibility with his mentor, Dr. Smith, who strongly encouraged him to plan on getting his master’s in animal science. He also began leading the judging team as a graduate student.

He recalled it was during graduate school when Smith planted the seed that Savell should consider pursuing a doctoral degree in animal science.

“I remember him talking to me about a PhD and I said, ‘I’m not smart enough to get a PhD.’”

“You let me be the judge of that,” Smith told him.

He took Smith’s advice and with his encouragement, Savell went on to work on groundbreaking research on the impact of electrical stimulation on beef carcasses, which was the topic of his dissertation.

Looking back at Smith’s role in him taking that next step in his education, Savell said he uses that same advice with his graduate students today.

“I say, ‘You have to listen to your mentors because they know more about you than what you know about yourself,’” he said. “They’ve had experience talking to people and evaluating and if they tell you that you have that capability, you need to listen.”

“Dr. Smith told me I needed to trust him, and I did. And I’m so glad that I did.”

Just before completing his PhD work, Savell heard about a job opening at the university working in the meat science area helping smaller plants comply with the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967. “Dr.” Savell was hired for that position and worked there for two years after his predecessor retired in 1977. He next took a teaching job working with Gary Smith after Carpenter took over as head of the Department of Animal Science.

Taking the torch

Fast forward to 1982: Smith was about to move into the department head position and Savell began teaching the meat science class that many felt only Smith could teach properly (including Savell).

“Forty years ago, he called me into his office and said, ‘There’s no way I can be department head and still teach this class, so I need you to start teaching.’ I said, ‘it’s scary, it’s too hard, that’s your class.’”

Savell joked that his students recently celebrated the 40th year of Animal Science 307 being his class and he doesn’t plan to ever stop teaching it.

“It’s the basic meat science class and I just feel like that’s what I’m called to do; that’s where I’ve had so many interactions with people,” he said, adding that nowadays, it isn’t uncommon that he’s teaching some of his early students’ children.

Savell said he cannot overstate the early influence of Gary Smith on his career but also points out that after Smith took over as department head, his successor was another globally recognized meat science legend, Russell Cross, PhD.

“So, I was the junior guy working with Gary Smith and Russell Cross for 10 years (combined),” Savell said. “Who could have come out with a better apprenticeship position than what I had working with people that were as well decorated as anybody in the country or even in the world? I benefited so much from being the junior guy – they cleared the way.”

Since then, Savell has continued to work closely with Kerri Gehring, PhD, a longtime, well-decorated professor in the meat science section of A&M’s Animal Science Department who received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Former Students at A&M earlier this year. The duo has worked together since the 1990s on food safety research and have co-taught an introductory HACCP course for nearly 30 years. They will continue to work closely together as she was promoted to associate vice chancellor for academic collaboration and associate dean for administration, in conjunction with Savell’s promotion.

Savell is grateful for the opportunities he’s had for decades to work closely in the meat lab, in the classroom and traveling the country with many colleagues including Gehring, Davey Griffin, PhD, Ray Riley, Dan Hale, PhD, Rhonda Miller, PhD and Jimmy Keaton, PhD.

“We’ve known each other for so long and worked side by side together and that has been so fun, I feel sorry for colleagues who don’t get to spend a lot of time together. We’ve had 30- and 40-year relationships and that’s hard to come by these days. It’s great professionally but after that long you think about how many weddings, funerals, trips to the ER together that we shared.

“There have been so many life events; great, wonderful things and also great sadness together. They’re there to support you when you need to be supported and it’s the same thing for you with them. And I think it goes back to how there’s none of these things you could do by yourself. By working together, we helped each other be the best versions of ourselves.”

Savell married his high-school sweetheart, Jackie, in 1975, and they raised three children and are the proud grandparents of four grandchildren. One of his sons, Jonathan (an Aggie from the Class of 2006), works in the meat industry as the senior director of food safety, quality and product development with Fort Worth, Texas-based Standard Meat Co.

The admiration Savell has for his colleagues as an extension of his family is reciprocated and they are some of his most ardent cheerleaders.

Griffin, professor and extension meat specialist in the Department of Animal Science, said Savell’s promotion solidifies many of the Aggie core values and makes the university stronger. Griffin and Savell met in the mid-70s, when Savell was in graduate school, and Griffin was an undergraduate. They’ve been colleagues and friends ever since.

“I like the fact that somebody recognized he could be an asset to the whole university in a bigger role,” Griffin said. “We’re very proud of the fact that he’s up there; it’s a breath of fresh air. He understands the role all three legs play in the mission of land-grant universities, extension, teaching and research.”

Gehring was a student in Savell’s Animal Science 307 course in the mid 1980’s. Later Savell co-chaired her Master’s and PhD committees, and they have been friends and colleagues since that time.

“I did not hesitate to accept Dr. Savell’s offer to join him in his new role. He is committed to ensuring that the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Texas A&M AgriLife are the best they can be for students, staff, faculty, and all stakeholders, and I look forward to supporting him in these endeavors.”

Savell said he’s a believer in teamwork and that any success he has enjoyed has been the culmination of his teams’ talents.

“When we collaborate, we have a chance to take everybody’s spiritual gifts and we get synergism that makes a big difference in all we do.”

That collaboration has also extended to involve other universities in many cases, he said, and those partnerships are especially rewarding when working with a smaller school that benefits from the resources available from an institution like A&M.

Savell prides himself on his ability to teach and connect with people at all levels of academia, in the classroom and in the industry. He said he has learned to talk to a wide array of people given his various roles over the past four-plus decades, ranging from livestock producers to FFA and 4-H kids, workers in meat plants and students in the classroom from all walks of life. Communicating well is the basis for succeeding.

“I’ve spent my whole life doing that,” he said. “I’m in the communication business, and so the audience is immaterial. It’s the fact that you have something that you’re trying to say to them, and you feel comfortable saying it to whatever the crowd is, because again, you’ve spent your whole adult life doing that.”

Decades of accolades

On one wall of Savell’s new office, which overlooks the campus and has a million-dollar view of A&M’s iconic football stadium, Kyle Field, hangs some symbols of his achievements, accomplishments and relationships he has proudly earned over the past five decades. Some of the more notable ones include a photo commemorating his role among a group of researchers that cleared the way for introducing electrical stimulation on carcasses in the beef industry as a tool to enhance quality and tenderness. Referencing a photo of a much younger Savell from about 1982, alongside some of that era’s A-list academics from the university who collaborated to commercialize electrical stimulation is still a source of pride for him 40 years later.

“I’m glad that they let the junior guy – the kid – be involved with some of the big guys on that,” he said.

Another noteworthy achievement, this one in the 1980s, was the result of investigating what was thought to be a consensus among consumers that there was an overwhelming preference for lean beef, which many assumed to mean beef with no marbling.

Savell was part of a research team that conducted the national consumer retail beef study in the early ‘80s, which concluded that what consumers really wanted was beef that tasted good, but they did not want all the fat on it, which led to the closer-trimmed cuts that are commonplace today.

Through that research, Savell and his team renamed the leaner beef. For the purpose of the study, the leaner cuts, which were previously categorized as “good,” got a new moniker that stuck.

“Good didn’t sound good for the test. So, we used ‘Select’ for the name – so we had Choice and Select.”

Following that study, the USDA was petitioned by one of the study’s supporting consumer groups, which resulted in the agency changing its beef carcass grade from “good” to Select in 1987, “to better fit consumer attitudes and perceptions as identified by the National Consumer Retail Beef Study.”

Then in the 1990s, Savell recalled how food safety became the focus of the industry, due in large part to the infamous Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in 1993.

He said succeeding in his role as an academic has required him to accept that change is inevitable and discovering solutions that embrace change has been a part of his evolution as an educator and a researcher.

“I’ve used that as an example to tell students that you will graduate with a degree, but you’ve got to be prepared that the field you’re in will change. And you have to always be a continuous learner.”

Fifty years after coming to College Station as a student, Jeff Savell started the fall semester of 2022 as the new vice chancellor and dean for Agriculture and Life Sciences of Texas A&M AgriLife. (Sam Craft/Texas A&M AgriLife Marketing and Communications)

 

Encore career

When first approached about applying for the position of vice chancellor and dean, Savell dismissed it because he had never served as a department head. However, the department head requirement didn’t apply since he was recognized as a Distinguished Professor at A&M in 2014, one of the highest honors given to Texas A&M faculty members.

Once he began the long application process for the position, someone along the way pointed out that Savell had never been an administrator.

“I said, ‘That’s correct.’ I said, ‘this building’s full of administrators. It needs leaders.’ I think that’s how I’ve tried to differentiate myself is from a leadership standpoint. There are so many people that are good at their jobs that I don’t have to be the person that has to know everything.”

He learned during that very thorough vetting process that the right candidate for the job didn’t necessarily need to wear a cape or be able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound.

“I realized what they’re looking for is somebody in the people business,” he said, which was right in Savell’s wheelhouse. Looking back at his long career, he said that mindset was at the foundation of his success.

“And when I have failed it was because I forgot that. That’s an important part of those relationships.”

In fact, since his first day on the new job, “We are in the people business” has become his mantra and a rallying cry for his team.

Savell succeeded Patrick Stover, who held the position for more than four years before assuming the position leading A&M’s Institute for Advancing Health through Agriculture. He vacated the vice chancellor, dean position in December 2021. The opening for his replacement was announced in the spring of 2022.

The position Savell ultimately was hired for is a dual role: vice chancellor and dean. As vice chancellor, Savell reports to the chancellor of the Texas A&M System, who oversees 11 universities and eight state agencies.

As dean, Savell’s role is to lead the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. As vice chancellor he is also responsible for leading four of the state agencies, including Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory and Texas A&M Forest Service.

“I’ve been so blessed in my career to have spent my career working in an area that I simply love,” he said.

Savell gained even more respect and academic accolades since creating a freshmen-only Texas barbecue class, aka ANSC 117, which started in 2009. Taught by Savell and Ray Riley, the seminar course teaches new students about the history of Texas barbecue and how to prepare it. About 300 students have taken the course to date and it is one of the most popular classes offered at A&M. Former students lobby Riley and Savell to assist with the class for the next years’ freshmen. That course spawned two other courses that are open to the public: Barbecue Summer Camp, an annual three-day class that started in 2011, and Camp Brisket, a two-day class that began in 2013. Seats for the camps sell out every year and have become a badge of honor for previous years’ students.

For Savell, these courses are another part of what makes the Texas Aggie spirit so special and that growing the community and the Aggie family is even more important than the slow-smoked meats.

“Barbecue isn’t what you eat, it’s what you do,” he said.

When explaining his allegiance to A&M, and his commitment and loyalty to the university, Savell said he wholeheartedly concurs with the lyrics from Texas A&M’s school song that it is “The spirit that can never be told.”

He added, “As a land grant university, A&M’s mission is to work and our culture is to be supportive of one another, very much like a family. We’re a college for the people; we teach, do research and we do service.”