By Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote
© 2026 New Mexico News Services

In 2006 I got an email from a savvy member of the business community. “Write an article about the UNM mess,” he wrote. “It is an ongoing story. After all, it’s our flagship research university.”

UNM had just gotten rid of Luis Caldera, a shouter, table pounder and top-down commander foisted on us by former Gov. Bill Richardson. I wrote: “Little in his professional background prepared him for university administration. He was personally aloof. He didn’t get New Mexico.”

Two more presidents followed. One provoked a vote of no confidence from the faculty over cronyism in a top-heavy administration. The other was forced out over vague insinuations of an abrasive management style.

Then there was the athletics department. A special audit documented nearly $700,000 in missing revenues, perks for insiders, mixing of public and private money, and years of overspent budgets.

By January 2018 UNM had cycled through seven university presidents in 20 years. In March regents hired Garnett Stokes as the institution’s first female president. This time they solicited input from stakeholders, and Stokes rode in with broad support. She hired such a capable new leadership team that after five years the faculty senate president said he had never experienced such stability.

UNM stopped being a mess for people like me to write about, although our institutions in Silver City, Las Cruces and Las Vegas have taken up the slack.

Now, sadly, Stokes is retiring after eight years in a notoriously difficult job. She led UNM through strained budgets, a pandemic, two campus murders, labor unrest and a new federal administration that’s not friendly to higher education.

Working in UNM’s public affairs office for four years, I marveled at the place every day.

A university is like a small town with all the same issues—crime, traffic, housing, infrastructure, healthcare—only you have a population of students. You and your learned employees are challenged to keep that population safe as you prepare them for the future. Now, add to that a burgeoning medical complex, student athletics, scientific research, and student protests. A lot can go wrong.

Garnett Stokes signaled from the get-go that she wasn’t your usual academic executive by visiting all 33 counties and listening to people’s concerns. In a letter to alumni, she wrote about “the importance of building relationships with the citizens whom the institution serves.” She promised “a transition plan based on active listening, campus collaboration and a mutual expectation of excellence.”

When she arrived in 2018 enrollment had dropped for five years in a row, the Legislature had cut $27 million in two years, the state was investigating financial mismanagement in athletics, and faculty morale was at an all-time low, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

Months later Stokes backed a decision by the new athletic director to cut three programs, including the popular men’s soccer, because of millions in red ink. I was covering the Legislature at the time. Students and parents were furious, and so were some powerful legislators. Stokes stuck to her guns. The department has been in the black ever since.

Two years in, COVID forced a rapid transition to online classes as UNM’s health system was trying to vaccinate thousands and contend with overwhelming numbers of very sick patients.

Garnett Stokes has won some and lost some. One lost battle was against organized labor.

After years of stagnant salaries, the faculty, adjunct instructors and graduate teaching assistants unionized. The latter (I used to call them the only legal slaves) hadn’t seen a raise in in years.

But she prevailed in bringing UNM proper and its health sciences campus under the same umbrella. Now UNM plans to double the size of the medical school by 2030, and it recently opened a new critical care tower to relieve overcrowding at the hospital.

Keep all this in mind while we think about complaints from the business community that regents didn’t seriously consider former ebay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman as Stokes’ successor.

I spent years covering New Mexico business for three newspapers, besides my time at UNM. A university and a company are much different operations for all the reasons you just read. Academics would look at a business executive, however worthy, as an outsider – not one of us. Let’s be honest. If you turn this situation around, and an accomplished academic wanted to head a major company, she or he would hear the same thing.

We’re thrilled to have Whitman among us and hope she stays engaged in public issues, but the regents did the right thing in sticking to their process and selecting Steve Goldstein, who brings his own academic chops plus experience in healthcare institution management.

We welcome him and wish him years of success.